She Lay Forgotten
by Fencing Supplies
Summary: During the war, Washington's forces are retreating and a horse is losing her mind. She calls him Satan, they call her Bulletproof. (Starts in the trailer. Meant to be a one-shot but it just kept giving me great opportunities to expand.)
1. Chapter 1

She is terrified. The men, the screams, the explosions and those smells.

God, those smells and noises. The bleeding out your last ounce of _blood_ and breathing in your last ounce of _breath_. They brought her here, she is strong. Strong for a mare, yeah, yes, indeed, she'll make a good mount.

In battle, it dose not matter how fast you go or smooth you ride, its all about one thing only.

How many bullets you can take.

They aren't expecting to bring you home.

And she's going crazy, she's out of her mind. Let me run! Let me run, please! She screams to the men that still clasp the reins with iron gloves. She rears against their hold, making her head snap and neck bend at a painful angle as her body goes to flee but her head cannot follow. You will never understand, the turmoil, the popping, roasting, spitting pus of anxiety and pure fear that slurps at her bowels. The men can hide behind the sheltering mounds, but she towers, she looks across and sees them lining her up.

The other horses, they were trained for this. She is the last, they are all dead, out there, in the field.

She can never look at open fields the same again, she can never look at men the same again, she can never live the same again.

She is a carriage horse, all her short life hitched to a wagon, all her life feeling like with every step she is dragging the weight of the world with her. Today, among many first, was the first time she felt a man sit upon her back.

Her eyes has rolled, there is a _thing_, there is a _something_ towering over _her_ and she can just _see this monster_ in the corner of her vision. The whites of her eyes had flashed as they rolled in fear then, later they had been squeezed tight in terror.

She bucked every man that flounced up to her within a heart beat, and they were still struggling with her now.

She is the last because she has not been ridden into death's face yet. And that is the only reason why. Coward.

Yet. And she is in the middle of swearing and vowing to the great gods and pitiful people that she will never step foot out there, she will never let a man sit upon her back and pat her exposed, weak neck. Her jugular all but left to mercy, her blind spot all but perfectly sat upon.

Yet. She violently struggles about, he comes, somehow having avoided her thrashing limbs. She does not have the sense to watch or contemplate him. After all, she is loosing her mind right now.

He does not stop to stroke her like all riders do, no, she dose not even notice him change from at her side to on her saddle.

She knows what he wants, he wants what all the others wanted, to go out there.

And something in her, something snaps, something throes its demonic head up and roars.

Fine, she will take him, and it will be the best damn entrance he ever made. She swirls and charges. Her eyes set on the big black stallion sitting calm on the hilltop far beyond. There is a barricade of spiked posts and, she was a cautious horse, she would never have entertain the idea of risking gutting herself. No horse would, it was an impossible height and width.

But she is not a cautious horse, has she not learned? She is demonic! This is not about the man upon her back! It was never about him!

She leaps and clears it as if soaring is just one of her many small talents.

A horse has never done that before. But of course, she is strong, is she not? She is strong, unusually strong. She is charging into war, not for the man, no, the man never told her anything, he could have wanted to go in the opposite direction for all she cared.

The only sensation feeding into her now, is her hooves pounding, not bothering to avoid the bodies, she churns over them with little care. Her eyes are set beyond, her mind is too far above her body, her ears only hear one sound, and that is of the cannons striking close but missing her speeding form.

They sound like raindrops did against her visors back at home.

The man, he leans on the rains, tearing her sensitive mouth apart as he hides behind her neck. She takes all of his bullets.

Let it rain.

It is raining her blood.

He is gone.

The ground comes, her body is out of control, and in the grass, she waits to die.

She watches him run on.

He has forgotten her already, her body has not even stopped rolling.

She watches the sky, the clouds, the eagle.

She had forgotten him too.

One brave American, lies broken amongst the dead.

Is she America? Does she classify? Dose she want to be?

One brave hero, lies forgotten. And in the middle of night, when everyone has gone, she stands.

And she walks on.


	2. Chapter 2

It is some weeks later. She wonders through the pine trees. The same blood crusted saddle strangling her girth, her sweat drying and itching under it, where she can never manage to itch no matter how much she has rubbed and bitten and bucked and run from it. The bridle is still there as well. She had stepped on the dragging reins long ago, snapping them. She tries to eat, but the grass wraps around the bite and chokes her.

The bullet holes, and the bullets themselves are still all implanted through out the entire length of her body. They are all puffed over with infection and flies, lapping at the juices which ooze out.

She looks like an abused nag to the marching redcoats that come across her.

Nothing like the demonic mare that rode the Assassin into battle. It's legendary, the man took down an entire platoon, he turned the tide from crippling defeat into crushing victory. That lone hooded man.

What about the strong beast that rode him fearlessly into battle?

They collect her and walk her back to their fort. Can always use an extra horse, and if she never equates to much then she can serve as food for the guard dogs and a nice, warming soup.

The horse boy dose not do much for her, he just takes off her tack and dumps buckets of brown muck water over her.

With the morning, comes the morning feed rations of a split, leaking bucket of water and hay she was sure belonged more on the floor of a stall than in a food box. And also comes the purple-pink-red-orange light, which highlights for the first time her wounds to the scrawly young boys of the stable yard.

And do they _gasp_. She wishes they could find it in their day to do more than run their fingers over her and babble.

She should be dead.

She thinks she should be too. She thinks, maybe, she was for a short time there.

She was in a fight.

No, she was in a revolution. She carried Satan into war so that he could show them how true horror and murder was done.

The doctor does not have time for a horse, but he comes to look (everyone comes to look) she is a side show, a wonder. How many more days will she last?

She lasts longer than them, for under the cover of the next morning's fog, Satan arrives.

She watches him scale the roofs and dispatch the guards silently, one by one, make a huge explosion, fight a pompous man, lower the flag. He heads out, flag replaced, duty done, taxes lowered, bodies sewn about the floor.

He is within meters of where she is roped, not in the stalls, the stalls are for the quality steeds, she is not even good enough for shade and a carpet of grass. He is walking, keeping his weight of his left foot now that she is close enough to see, when one of the young stable boys comes out of his hiding spot.

The gun in his hands is shaking uncontrollably in his young hands, she wants to tell the young foal to go home, to run home to his mother like he should. Why, he would be barely eleven.

Satan lunges and leans against her. She realises too late that she is serving as a shield yet again. The gun fires with a cloud of smoke and it burrows it's way into her back leg. She feels anger, burning seething anger, not at the boy, or the gun, or the bullet or the pain.

At Satan, how can he do this too her again? She never agreed to be his shield nor his sacrifice. She will shield on her terms, and run into death on her own command.

She snakes her neck around quick and bites into his arm, she hears him yell and she knows she has not only drawn blood, but crushed a bone.

The boy is clumsily loading the gun again, and Satan has a choice. Try and limp away as quick as possible, but die via gun wielded by child. Kill such child. Mount blood thirsty horse and see how fast she can run you away.

With a blade that came from nowhere, he slices her tether and volutes onto her back, grimacing through the pain. She grimaces through her own as well. She feels the weight, not of a man, but of Satan. He sit very differently upon her back. And like before, she knows, she does not want the man to kill the child, so she runs him away and out of the fort before the gun has time to aim.

And she runs.

Never stopping.

Never wondering how she learnt to read the man's ways. She was never taught how to understand a riding man's cues, but she did know that the sensation of the whip against one's side meant to pull the cart in that direction.

Somehow, her and Satan get along seamlessly. He leans or absently ghosts a palm over her walloping muscles. Through the morning, through the winding mountainous range, through the woods into a cluster of buildings.

Into Davenport.


	3. Chapter 3

The master has a passion for horses, she can tell. The stables are large and spacious, the horses inexplicably fine. At least here...

At least here she gets to stretch out under a tree, on a carpet of well watered grass and startle the monarch's with her snores. Still, there is pain, riddled into her like larvae. When the master has time, he will come and tisk over her, the big girthious mare roped to the old oak. Maybe he will manage to sponge her with hot water, or comb knots out of her mane. Most of the time, he is simply too old to do such things, and most of the time, he dose not want to waste effort on a lost cause.

He only bothers to care - truly care- about the head held high, long legged, swift built riders up in his stables. Oh, those other horses! With their precise whinnies and muscle tone. Their figure's are the type a man will wax poetically on about, then paint for the place above his mantle.

She, what is she? She is carriage horse, thick at the hips, big in the knees, dumb in the eyes. At least that's what she was born from. There is no prestige about her, nor her breed. She does not have a breed, she is common muscle, maybe even cheap muscle. People don't see her form and imagine a proud saddle upon her back, they see her strangled to a heavy wagon, head lowered, walking until she reaches the end of the world.

But she's demonic, she ran into battle, she ran Satan, she galloped him all the way from the fort, across the entire frontier, back to his homestead. Not a runner? Not a sprinter? Not smart enough to be trusted unchained?

Well let her tell you something, those horses up there, with a trained air to them, like they know what a whistle means or how to jump on cue, well, she is probably smarter than all of them. She's always been smarter, wiser, trickier. She knows things, she sees things.

Once, when she was a foal, there was a man with a golden light, who had hidden himself away in the rotten, dead grove in her paddock. The glowing thing, the one in the man's hands.

She paused and thought back. No. It had been a woman, with braids and feathers and fur. The human used to lie beside her, stroking her coat, placing the glowing orb on different parts of her, like it was some intriguing experiment. She hadn't carried for what the human was doing, back then, all she had wanted was comfort after her mother had been taken away to pull the carts in the mines.

There was something different in how the woman spoke. Over the weeks, months eventually, they would always sit together, in the nights huddled around the sparking ball like some sort of mysterious fireplace.

It changed her, she know it did, she could feel it, in her brain, in her mind.

And she started to know things, to remember and work things out. Putting faces to actions and committing sounds to dangers. More so than the average horse. Quicker than the horse that used to pull the cart's alongside her.

Those horses up there and their air's of intelligence, it was all a ploy, for she knew that when the floods came, she would be the one to find the safe route, and they would be swept away.

Later on, Satan noticed her out of the corner of his eye when he was leaving the manor. He considered her, wasting away, no where ready to retire yet. After all, think of the size of her, the distance which she had covered with him. Surly there must be some man that needs such a fine beast?

There was, a farmer. His last horse had just died of a snake bite and needed a new beast to pull his plough and to cart the produce into town for trade. She was perfect, if not a little horrifically scared, for the job.

She did not care for the man, she pulled his plough like nothing and carried him up the hill to the mill, barley puffed.

It was the wife that saved her teetering, fevering life. One look at her and soon the pregnant woman was spending all her spare hours dabbling away with spices and petals, mixing nutritions into the best diet she had ever been fed on.

One day, the lady could hardly move any more for her swelling feet. She positioned herself beside the fence, and waited for the lady to think of the obvious solution herself. Carefully, the farmer climbed up into the fence, then clambered onto the large plains of her broad back (for she was a huge horse).

As she walks around the farm, plodding, the ballooning wife sitting softly upon her bare back, she thinks of how life does turn. Once, she rode Satan into war, now she takes the farmer's pregnant wife around the farm with stifling care, the woman tossing handfuls of feed to the chickens, ducks, into the pig pen as they walk close and checking that the fences have not been broken or animal's stolen all from her high back.

The man hitches her to a loaded cart. Oh, how it groans, not only with the farmer's goods, but the tailors, the chefs, the lumber's and the blacksmith's. The only other cart horse in the homestead, a smudgy white gelding, pulls alongside her. Together they make it to Boston by that afternoon.

In Boston, it is raining, the type of rain that makes you feel like ice is streaming down you withers. The wind is howling, howling like wolves covered in a man's blood. They arrive at the trading shop and there men get to work unloading the goods and buying what the others at home needed brought back. She and the smudgy grey stand silent, trying to ignore the nails of the water droplets as they scratch through their sickened sides.

And she sees Satan up ahead, her blinkers hiding most of him. He wouldn't recogniser her, not from where he is hiding in the alley far in front, stealing glances up and down the deserted cobble street. She is a dead grass brown, but in the rainy-afternoon-you-would-think-it-night she is now a dark caramel

The farmer unhitches her and the smudgy grey, deciding to stay the night instead of risking the wild weather and impending night out on the frontier. And when he does not tie her up correctly and her lead breaks loose. She knows where she is going.

What are you up to Satan?

She trots down the desolate streets, following his left over smell that is mingled with another and the glimpses of his tailcoat from the roofs. She is all but bare expect for a loose, fraying halter around her head and lead trailing sodden and forgotten between her legs.

She tracks him all the way to the gates and sees him winding around the horses, searching for a mount to take out onto the frontier. She picks up her hooves and canters over to him, stopping startling close to his side and splashing him with water. He dose not recognise her at first as she stands, huffing in anticipation for a gallop with him (a good fine gallop, something a carriage horse never even _dreams_ off), but then a strike of lightning lights up her numerous scars and his voice mutters in a tone of recognition.

Stealing tack off another horse, the riding gear is tight and mispositioned for it is made for a breed far smaller than her. Vaulting into her back and gathering the reins, Satan eases her forward to meet with the man's companion who was waiting on his own mount.

The man lifted an eyebrow. "Will that mammoth keep up?" The other horse was nimble and shorter, lighter and more conventional in every means.

"I recognise this horse," Satan says back, "I do not know what she is doing wandering through Boston, but it has worked out in benefit of me."

Then suddenly, there is a cocky grin she has never seen before.

"She will put your scrawny mount to shame, so best not judge, father."

And there is that tingle of adrenaline again as they set out for the frontiers, where the storm is only worse. It's nothing like the rage of the war, but still,

She's addicted.

And, she does end up putting the young wiry thing to shame, the black horse's ego deflated with a noticeably sizzle as it trails far behind, not able to match stride or keep up with her harrowing pace.

Satan laughs. She sniggers along with him. They have time to stop and hunt while they wait for the others to catch up. She traces his form through the trees, keeping close in case he ever needs her, but far enough away not to scare off his prey.

She does not bother to think how she learnt to read his cue's so well and when exactly it was that she started to trust his strong words with such complete victory.


	4. Chapter 4

She finally clears the tree line, and captures her first glimpse of the Patriot's fort. It looks like the had broke the mountain, impaling it and excavating its guts out. She walks through, eyes wide, ears apart, marvelling at the rows upon rows of men and beasts, tents and crates, guns and carts.

They reach the top, right at the very top, and Satan slips from her hold. She swirls her head around and looks at all the gasps and grimaces of the sights she is beholding. For beyond the fort, is the slopes, and beyond them is the cleared plains, and past that is the forest's foreshadowed presence and past that still, is the cliff's cuffs and mountain's manipulated backbones. She has never been is such a high place, at least not one that gave her a view. At least not while she was without those blasted blinkers that shut off her eyesight.

She and the young thing stand patiently as the human's confer with the man who presides at the very top.

Watching a murder of crows peck about a ways off, the sharp, harsh sounds of Satan reached her ears. Flicking back to him, she studied his face, trouble, agitation...betrayal? Just watching him pace and cough words at the other men make her stomach hiss and tail twirl and churl in anxiety. Satan. Satan. She watches him jab his finger and slap a consoling hand away, she watched as he spins and stalks for her.

Oh, joy! She felt him, all his turmoil pouring into her, she felt his foot in the stirrup, preparing to lunge up onto her back. She felt like a barrel of fuel, and he a naughty, dancing spark. She had to hold her muscles back from catapulting forward, she chomped at her bit and tossed her head, her forelock coming over her eyes.

She paid no mind, all her wordy attention was on the man, now having just touched down on her back. She wanted to surge like a a rouge wave, like vomit from a poisoned man's throat, like a unruly swarm of salmon down the rapids.

But he held the reins tight and sore against her tongue. He was not ready to go, he still had one last threat to make.

"Do not follow me."

He lessoned the reins, pressed his legs tight around her and with that, it felt like the bloody gates at the races courses had just just snapped open. She charged off, down the wide road of before, Satan's body moving with her, he was running too, his heart was as hot as hers.

They crossed the river and into the forest, she desperately tried to stay to the vein like trails that mapped throughout the undergrowth of the forest, but at the speed he was digging from her, every now and again she would over shoot a turn.

The adrenaline, the desperation. She knew exactly what this was even though she had never the pleasure to be in one.

This was not simply a chase, on of which the steeple mount's bragged of. A fox chase, running after the shimmering bodied of the hounds. This was more, this was great, this was leagues away and several raw emotions removed.

This was a hunt.

For blood, for power, for death and bodies.

Satan was back.

No mercy.


	5. Chapter 5

The first man they found was hunched over something broken, scratching his dandruff scalp and shaking his clean shaven head in dismay. She drew close to his hunched form and watched as the man's face lit up when he saw her and the rider, but then, folded and greyed so quickly she knew what had to –had to – be coming next.

A gunshot rippled through the air, straight to the head.

And she didn't have time to watch his blood spray or body crumple, didn't have time to jerk or think about the action, she did not even have time to smell the left over smoke of the explosion. Because Satan's sharp heels were again in her ribs. And she was all but his loyal hound. Both of them enslaved to the rush of the hunt.

She tore through the forest, like a runaway bull train, vaulting over holes that could have snapped open any horse's leg. The river came into view, and she crossed it, not carrying for the slippery, round rocks that were hidden underneath. She twisted all four of her hooves but raced out the other side, gait unchanged.

And under the soft moonlight, far along the path, between the lichen covered ash, firs and alders of the forest, there was the illuminated form of three soldiers upon three walking mounts. Three dead men, unaware of that hell's master had designated them to die.

Three blind mice.

She cantered close, none of them recognising her ascending presence yet, the well toiled stretch of path muffling and absorbing the shocks of her strides. She drew closer and close and in the wild craziness of the moment, she felt Satan shift and stand upon her back.

And leap.

It is one of weirdest feelings, for your rider to suddenly lift after a hard ride, it feels like your legs have grown ten feet talker and your head gets woozy with the change of weight. She slows and watches as he decapitates the first man, his cry of anguish alerting the others.

See how they run.

And with the precision of a ballerina, he calmly lungs to the next who rode too close, and shoots the other in much the same manner as the first man they had killed that night.

They? They killed. Or was it just him? She had known what he was seeking yet still rode him towards his goal. Was she just as much to blame, an eager accomplice in this horrible mass of murder? A willing accessory?

Upon the seedy spotted horse he had lept to; Satan took off down the path and disappeared through the small canyon valley up ahead.

She stood. What had just happened? Why did she feel betrayed, left behind without a care, with only dead men and freaked out horses as company? She wanted to scream after him. But I still have more to give! I am not even spent! She tried to, but she could not manage much of a noise through her heavy, heaving panting, tonguing for air. Sweat was cascading down her sides and the pains of the fast, dangerous ride through the forest were starting to be born all throughout her body. Born fresh and screaming, still slick with the juiced of the womb. How these new pains were mounting on top of one another, breeding more and more into life! She took a step and found herself nearly collapsed. Like shrill, long jaws had taken for the inside of her flesh, sharp, ongoing, in growing, pains inside her ankles and knees, searing, boiling hot scratches from the outstretching limbs of scrubs and trees she had beaten past. Oh how deep they must have cut her to be feeling like this! As deep as a stockman's whip. As deep as a butcher's knife into a chicken's poor, pink breast.

But, she still has the chase inside. Growling and twisting against his snare, chocking but only fighting more and more because of it. Inside her expansive chest and lungs so large and engulfing, it tear's free.

With that thought, she galloped, no, flew after him.

Hooves striking flint as she ran, she snarled and planned just where she was going to bite him for this. What is she to him, a particularly strong horse? A particularly peculiar animal?

She will have to change that certain rudimentary outlook.

Another body lay across the path, with two highly strung horses pacing and flexing around him, not sure what to do. One of which was the seedy spotted one. She pasted by them in a whisk, above the scene, above their animalistic fears and insecurities.

She continued on down the path, winding and turning, running and leaping over fallen trunks. She ran and ran, eyes searching for him. How far can a human run on their own scrawny legs? Surely he must be just around the next bend, the next one, this one; this one has to be it!

It was not until she saw the beginnings of the sunrise that she realised with a halting shock.

She had lost him.

And now, she was lost herself.


	6. Chapter 6

Where was she? It looked nothing like anything she had seen. It was as if she had run through the frontier and beyond its bounds even still.

She turned back, looking to retrace her steps. But where were they? Had the path ended miles back but she refused to notice? Was she that single minded that she had charged on, determined to carve her own way through the wild?

Somewhere is the distance; an old, great grandfather elk whistled his eerie call. This time she walked, careful, every step measured and watched. The details you see once you stop and look! Aren't they fanciful? She marched softly, like a solider, but one wistfully thinking of his sweetheart back at home. Through the pools of daisy's and random groupings of berry bushes, monkshood and bugbane, whose tall sky scraper flowers reached out and kissed gently over her flanks as she ghosted through them. It was as if God hand had spasmed when he painted this landscape, so inconstant, speckled and marred with decay yet beauty was it.

Tumbling down the slope, slowly her steps sounded less like a wife ponding at dough and more like…sploshes.

The swamp was a silent place if it was not for the insects that swarm it with their colliding bodies or hums and whines. The edges of the murky water were crowded by pines, like they were all shouldering to get closest to the water before they were frozen in timber shells. She looked around for another way across, but the slope had funnelled her downwards and the high rock walls had been caged her in without her realising for some time now. There was only one way.

She eyes the far bank warily. At least there was no current to fight.

What was in the dense forest that smothered the banks? What animals were watching her as she stroked through the swamp. Up to her knees now, it climbed still, and soon she was feeling lillypad's tickle at her shoulders and water weed get snagged in the stirrups of the saddle.

Nostrils flaring, she kept her eyes trained on the bank that was drawing closer and closer, even as her feet could find no bed to push against.

In those moments, she swam, thrashing but making no loud splashes for all her frantic kicks and striking limbs were tucked under the water's surface. Indeed, she was silent with only the puffing of her breathe permitting the birdless morning.

Heavying out of the water with a squelch and a gush, the pond race off her in curtains. Everything was wet and streaked with mud, saddle and reins now laced with green and yellow water plant. Only her neck and head remained clean and the same kindling brown that she naturally was.

Proudly she kept moving forward, hard pressed to find gaps through the tight pine forest that would fit her width. The land was hitching up, and she pricked her ears forward as its rose and rose, steeper and steeper still. Soon she was walking with vigour, head nearly to the ground and snout amongst the harsh floor vegetation. Shoulders burning as she pulled her entire heavy body with her front legs alone, her back two only there to brace and follow. It felt like she was almost walking vertically, sometimes slipping back down, having to lean on the trucks of the trees to stop from sliding backwards or losing her balance.

Still she marched for the summit, pond weed swaying from where it was caught on her, the last droplets flying of the tips of her long knotted tail or being washed away in a new wave of sweat. The hot, still, windless forest did nothing for her.

Still she marched on. To the top, for the top. If there even was a top. She will find it.

And reach it she did, pulling herself up the last few steps before stopping and surveying the land before her. The horizon, the unstoppable green of the forests that stretched out before her, the valleys and gorges, the mountains on either side. It overwhelmed her, it made the view from the fort look like a stinking molehill.

With a new energy she slammed her cheek into the nearest tree and started to rub it vigorously, hoping for the leather to break or for the strap to catch over a branch and be torn in two. She needed the bit gone from her mouth, so she could graze contently without the steel bar catching and infuriating her.

Enraged, she looked for some stubby limb that she could break the bridle on. Trotting over to one, she made many attempts to hook it over before getting it and then threw her head down to the ground with such aggression that her muscles pained at the sharp movement.

But it was the branch that broke, not the leathered.

With a red hot neigh of fury, she reared and took off down into the landscape that stretched before her. Not bothering to dodge bushes and so bowling them over, kicking rocks loose and having them roll down like stampeding cattle in her wake.

Sometimes she would locked her knees up and instead of running down the slope, she was skating down, leaving long harsh grooves in the rocky side of the mountain.

Oh! How close she came to danger! One hole or slip and it could have been the end of her, leg broken, wounded in the desolate wild, only wolves or bears to notice her distressed cries of crippledom

But she reached the other side, and how the land did stretch out before her. Like a racecourse, as if suddenly the trees had been cracked apart, a magnificent scar of only hoof high grass before her.

How she did _run_. Like a criminal from the cops, a fox from the hounds, a flash of lightning from the storm. Peasants and hares would throw themselves out of her path, her iron hooves digging deep into the ground and spitting great matted clogs of earth and grass into the churning currents of her past image.

She had no idea where she was running to, but it was ahead.

And she was not stopping until she made it.

It turns out what she was running for was nothing for than a terrifying stop. She sighted a wolf pack in the distance, their grey bodies jogging away from her, small like finches' from afar.

With that, she flung her head to the right, her body following, and made for the scent of a river.

And at the river, she flung her head, and made for the scent of some sugar sweet grass.

And at the sugar sweet grass, she flung her head, and made in the opposite direction from the scent of a bear.

And in the midst of a tired trot, she flung her head yet again in surprise.

And made for the scent of a horse.

Weaving through the forest, one that was slowly dissolving open into grassland, she searched by the setting sun. Bird's called their good nights and owl's hooted their good mornings. It was the noisiest time of day, with every animal rushing to find their loved ones and settle down safe for the coming hours. Where the real hunters come out.

The wolves howl's told one as much.

She prayed desperately that she found this horse, a sibling spirit would do much not only to protect a back, but also calm a rattled soul. She didn't care if the horse turned out to be a psychopath, shunned out of society into the wild.

That was how _desperate_ she was.

She found the horse, she found them all._  
_

A hold herd grazing in a field of grass that came to their belly buttons. An old poaches nag who had to survive alone once his man feel victim to the bear he was stupidly tracking. A horse stolen by a runaway slave, ridden west and always west, hard and fast, until the rider succumb to an infection on his cane thrashed back.

Yet the horse lived on.

And a foal separated from his mother in a storm, a horse lost in a blizzard, a small pony who threw her tantruming child rider and fled, a solemn black horse that used to pull the funeral cart's in town, a farmer's beloved, hand reared orphan, who got separated and driven out of her home valley in a forest fire.

These horses could be all that and much more.

A mare stubborn and strong, which chased her bloodthirsty rider from one end of the night to the other. Yet got lost herself, abandoning her rider far more than he did her.

* * *

_Thank you to everyone that reviewed. I read every one (multiple times) and was really touched. _

_In the Assassin's Creed III timeline, from the last time we saw Conner to the next thing he does in the game, there is a time leap of one whole year. So I'm going to waste away that whole year before I have him come into the story again, I just don't want to be making up too much stuff about what he's going while the guy still has cannon events to be working through._


	7. Chapter 7

She was accepted into their fold with ease. The stallion is in charge of chasing away dangers and strangers, but he was practically ushering her over. Just another babe in his harem, she was sure.

She watched him with a weathered eye; she asked herself that if it came to it, would she bear his child in order to remain in the herd?

She considered him; none of these horses were the powerful mustangs of the campfire tales. All were mangy, poor steeds who only ended up here through hardships. The foals sleeping amongst their mother's guarding legs were probably the first generation of wild born from the herd.

But he was a particularly…fascinating colour of lolly red which burned orange underneath. And watching him graze in the distance, isolated, like every stallion does, she supposed he was as kind as one could hope for.

What did this herd promised her? Safety, company, they would teach her how to survive in the wilderness; they would look after her like she will soon look after them and when winter comes, she will need them even more.

A white came up and sniffed her over; she eyed the fresh bite marks that laced the runaway's side and also the numerous ticks suckling amongst the beast's brittle coat. As the mares of the herd took it upon themselves to assess the new addition, she focused on the health of them. Tick's in places where they couldn't be rubbed off, the groin, the armpit's, the abdomen and their life scared faces.

There was no velvety snouts or flowing manes here. Only sides scabbed up from punishment.

When she saw that the foals carried the same abuse on them, she decided that she would do something. It was her responsibility to them after all, where she stood a whole head taller, feeling like for everyone one of their muscles she possessed two.

She turned around to the candy stallion. Was he the one doing this? But he looked so placid, leaning up against the tree, snoring and waking himself up with a jerk. She watched his profile in the last ounce of sunlights, and saw that his sides were unmarred. Why would he be-

And then she felt it, a quick pain in her flank, a warning.

She spun around to find that the herd had scattered and in their places stood a palomino mare. Her ears were pinned so far back she looked more hissing snake than horse.

It did not take a detective to figure out this mystery, and lucky for that, for she was certainly no detective.

If she did not submit to the aggressor, than she knew that the horse would chase her out of the herd and back into the new-night. Watching the way the herd had gathered some distance away, every inquisitive face watching what was going on between them two, she knew this had to be the lead mare.

Which made her crawl with a feeling of wrongness when she looked back at the spit fire elder. The lead mare was meant to be the one with the most common sense, one that inspires trust within the herd. Not a tyrant.

The palomino lashed out at her again, but she was never one to submit. Rearing her head up, showing the abuser just how _bigger_ she _definitely_ was, she dared to bare a _slither _of her teeth.

The lead mare charged at her, mistrustful after her action, her hooves striking out, promising a blow more damaging that any axe or anvil. The palomino swung herself around, and she knew what was coming next. Rearing up and twisting her body as far out of range as possible, the matriarch's crippling buck missed her by only centimetres.

They had only just begun.

Still high above in her rear, she angled her body so that when she rushed down her hooves slammed into the now exposed backbone of the lead mare. Leg's caught up on top of the older beast, the other horse spun, mouth wide open and lips drawn back in a face worthy of a cornered cougar. Unable to catch her balance after her legs became tangled and crossed on the lead mare's back, she tried desperately to divert the mustang's bee line to her jugular. Flogging her head around, she tried to crack their two skulls together.

But instead the battle wise horse managed to score one on her face, clipping the bottom eyelid but not the eye. She screamed, it felt like the whole bloody left side of her face and been gouged out, leaving only the sight of an exposed jaw bone and molars.

Of course, it was not that serious. But the lead mare drew away with a mouthful of skin and meat.

But also a strap of bridle.

With a leap of heart, she shook her head like a dog after a bath, and while blood was running like a river, splaying about the air and giving her a halo of red, she had only eyes for the feel of a bridle falling over ears and off snout.

And the final wondrous joy of opening up one's mouth and feeling the bit fall out, clattering onto the granite ground.

Suddenly.

She wasn't a prisoner.

She wasn't going to starve.

She wasn't going to die out here.

She didn't need these horses.

And she could have turned and fled, she should have done that. The wise choice. But she wanted to finished this.

Charging the other mare, she collided with a titanic boom that had the other gasping for breath on the ground underneath her.

But she wanted to finish this.

With a rear that felt like it reached the stratosphere, she slammed her hooves down onto the palomino's skull.

And there she stood, adrenaline suddenly thrum dead gone. The sight of her hooves inside the other mare's skull froze her. Had she really just done that? What happened if she had been wrong?

And the feel, lord the feel! Of her two front feet, still in a bath of blood and bone and brain. She jerked her feet out, wishing she could ignore how the hooves caught on shards of skull and so pulled the dead animal's head up with her until it yanked free and feel back with a phantom thud.

She turned and galloped for the moon's knowing glare. Wishing to run it all away. Across fields, through woodlands, over scattered boulders.

It took her a few moments to realise, but the bastard's beaten herd had following her. Lost and confused now that their manipulator had gone.


	8. Chapter 8

This was wrong, this was all wrong. She couldn't deal with a puppy dog herd; she was trying to find her way back to Satan! This band's leadership methods were whacked; she should not have been the one to succeed the lead mare. That authority should go to the next mare that has the best knowledge on the area, where the water holes are and wolves' dens. Where to hide from the blizzards in winter, god damn!

The lolly stallion cantered lethargically around the bend, but stopped far in the distance, watching the current political catastrophe with an interested gleam but knowing that it was not his place to get involved.

The herd assumed that this was the place she wanted to take them, and so happily settled into the area and started to graze at anything that was available. Which was nothing more than weedy spear grass around the tree's feet.

Why was she the mare? Was this herd honesty so young that a newcomer had just as much knowledge on how to survive as they did? Was she ready to determine when to move and the best route, and claim the right to drink first from watering holes and stake out the best location for grazing? She had never been a lead mare before; she had never been part of an actual herd before. Sure she had stable mates and grazing buddies in the pastures, but not a whole, functioning society which was suddenly hers to ensure the health of!

But isn't she perfect lead mare material? So smugly smart and strong, she is perfect for the job.

And hadn't she just displayed that to the herd, finding the violent mare within minutes, drawing conclusions and glueing together evidence so quickly that light looked slow for a moment there. And hadn't she displayed, her power and ability to protect them?

With a sigh, she decided that she needed to lead the herd somewhere more suitable that the scungy place they were now, and think on how she was going to go about ditching them later.

In the morning, she took them back to the river she had found during the last day. They all stood eager to drink, but not game enough to do so before her.

She spent most of the day exploring the area slowly, stopping to let the shadowing heard graze and nap under the shade of some flowering apple trees.

Finding hidden caves, places to cross the water ways, exciting tracks through a baby canyon, by the end of the day, she was hooked on the power she held.

Watching the foals chase one another about the herd's resting bodies, she felt content.

And also protective.

So when she noticed the lolly red stallion plod his way to them, she neighed angrily at him to get back.

He took a stupid step closer, and she sent him a warning show of her teeth and stamped her hooves into the ground, making dangerously heavy impacts. A stallion's job is to stay at the edge of the herd's domain; he is out there to fight off predators and she wants him to god damn _stay_ out there so when challenging males come for him, their deathly fights will not have the possibility of accidently including others.

But she could tell he was stubbornly interested in coming to them, checking if any of the mares were ready to mate and doing his stallion dues.

She was not impressed.

At all.

Closer he came, and she realised with a wash of glee- she was far bigger than him. Why, he must be part pony. How does such a runt like male become the stallion of his own band? Were there no others to challenge him? All picked off too soon by predators or falls from rocks?

Maybe that was it, that he was just quieter, slower, more careful.

He knew how to wait, and so tossed her a mistrustful whinny and stamped off to his proper place. At the perimeter. Alone.

And her mind now has thoughts only on where they are going, what they need and how she can get that for them. Satan was all but pushed away under the pressure that she feels to care for her herd. Just the other day a foal died of a sickness, not unusual in the wild.

But it crippled her; she sobbed and didn't move from the infant's side. Death.

And, in many ways, she cares for them astoundingly well. Tending to them all like they are her own cubs and she is their wolf mother.

For indeed, she is wild and crazy enough to be one.

And she leads them through the seasons, into summer and autumn and they are just on the first breathes of winter now.

When her first great challenge in a while appears.

Man. He left a campsite by the river and in the morning she hears their horses whinny under the sharp spurs.

Humans, it has been so long now. They disgust her. She will smash their skulls in like she has done to many who have foolishly threaten her herd.

Whips will not tame her, chains will not hold her and leads will not control her, never again.

She is wild.

She is mustang.

Yet when the men cleared the ridge, her heart leaps in doubt. There were fifty of them, nearly two for everyone one of her small heard. She would have to run her herd hard and fast and cunning to lose the humans.

But what of the foals? They would fall behind. She cannot have that.

So she rears and feels the exact same demonic rush as she had in her time within the war's terrible noose.

She will _fight_ then.

And the men poured down the hill like a waterfall of leather and steel, their mile long whips slicing the air and making echo's throughout the range.

The first one came, and she lunged and spun, landing hits, taking many more. She was surrounded, besieged, drowning as they swirled and corralled around her, zoning in on the aggressor, determined to subdue her, knowing that the herd would be lost with its leader.

And in charged the lolly red through the dusty walls, rearing up high and shouting.

This is my herd!

These are my heads!

Let me be heard!

And she tore a man off his spotted steed, throwing him on the ground with a thud. And she realised, with a tremendous ache, that lassos upon lassos were wrapping their way around her, she could hardly move anymore.

She turned and watched the lolly red stallion battle against the men, they ran in a massive circle around him, like an enormous school of bait fish dancing from the reach of a predator.

The ropes were starting to tether him down more and more, the whips crack along his backside so much, that he was not lolly red anymore.

He was blood red.

And in that moment of dust and grains, of the sounds of buckles and straps she had all but forgotten, he had finally proven his worth to her. So she screamed to him to take the heard and run for the canyon, to lose them amongst the maze like reverts and paths.

He did just that, tearing men from their seats as they tried to hold onto their ropes but only got dragged along in the ferocious pony's strength.

She realised, watching the herd turn and run with the injured, small stallion chasing up the rear. Size never should have mattered. What a superficial horse she has been.

And she held them off by charging and biting and thrashing against their alienating holds, half of the human's rode off for the herd.

Half stayed to try and contain her wild fury.

What was it about her that held their attention, which made their unshaven faces twinkle in good humour?

Later on, when the other half returned empty handed, a man approached where she was tied. She was barely able to move an ear let alone leg to kick him away with.

And his worn hands fluttered over, ghosting up feelings she had tried to suppress for seasons.

And slowly, he unbuckled the parasitic saddle from her back.

And she couldn't help it.

She sighed in thanks.


	9. Chapter 9

The corrals are a terrible place full of depression and suppression. Where wild horses are strapped up, caged in and told to deal with it. But wild animals do not deal, they do not disintegrate for something as weak as a man, it really is laughable.

At first.

But then, the food stops coming, and you, an animal of winds and plains and lakes, are barred inside a stall you can't even turn around in for weeks on end.

In order to deal, first the wild horses must dismantle their own selves.

And that is why it is called 'breaking them'.

There is no concerned man to hand you cold melon to ease the pain as you get used to the feel of the bit again. There is no gentle eyed farmer who puts the saddle on loose and for only a moment at a time, tightening it a notch per day and staying it for a minute more.

There is no compassion; it is just strap and whack. God, she had no problem with the tack when it was Satan, she trusted that man, but when its these horse breakers, she just wants with every fibre to reject it all.

Her heart aches for the herd,_ her_ herd. How they would run through the rain after her, full of trust, time would cease in those brilliant moments. The whole bloody world grinding to a halt around her, you know those moments? In the rain, a whole herd of powerful mustang's breathing hot, fanning fire down your back, where its feels like your steps are striking gold with every rhythmic pound.

She doesn't expect you to.

In the stinkin' hot dust baths of the corrals, she learned for the first time how to read a human's signals. Sure she could ride with Satan, but he communicated differently. When they reached a fork in the road, he would shift his weight, anticipating her to turn, and she would read that and respond.

But all this other stuff, she never knew beyond instinctive understanding. Yanking on just one side of your mouth meant to go that side, a whip to the ribs instead of the rump was a spur to go faster instead of punishment, when a rider wraps their legs tight around you and pulls the reigns taunt, that is the cue to gallop like your mother was two seconds off going down rapids to her death, but you were still two miles away.

She liked learning; it invigorated her, the puzzle solving she had to do, completing her drills weeks before the others learned what the humans were trying to get at. She loved working the saddle, instead of the wagon.

But being a lead mare was more challenging still...

Yet, the human's still saw her as a hefty big beast only, a perfect draft horse. And it's not like there is anything wrong or unpleasant about the job, it's just that, she is one of those horses that lives for the wind in the mane and the pounding down the paths.

The wars.

The hunts.

Fighting, leading, charging...

Of course, she already knew all there was to carriage work, so within the month she was deemed ready for sale. At the first hint of sun on the first Friday of the month, she was saddled up and ridden for a horse market. Three other horses were being sold like her, but they had been tethered to a cart and were walking all the way there, from the very wild edge where the corrals were all the way into New York.

She was ridden in front of them at an economical canter. The man riding abreast her back must be in charge of organising the accommodation and spots in the monthly horse markets, for him to be pushing her to ride and get their nearly half a day earlier.

Sometimes she wonders why she doesn't try to escape, and its meet with the assured knowledge that human's always- _always_- slip up. She had better chance with a new buyer than the horse breakers. Those men don't run like normal ranchers, its a prisoner, its a torture asylum, they are caging and breaking wild horses. They are running a very tight ship, and she knows that the smartest thing to do is get yourself out as soon as possible before you even entertain ideas such as rejoining a beloved herd.

Trotting through the gates into New York, she knew there was no way that she would be able to stand the inner city. Not after so long away. She was freaking out already, chomping and dancing her back legs around at the thought of the cobbled roads, screaming children, tight buildings, people everywhere and you not knowing what to do or where to go. Concrete scrapping your steel shoes with frustrating pain.

Luckily her rider knew this; after all, one does not take a freshly turned mustang into a rattling, spewing, hustling hive. So they kept to the edge, where there is still grass and trees and goats that need to be sidestepped. The horse market was in the North-East of New York, within view of a windmill and the tall masts of the harboured ships.

The man slide off and did confusing, human things, registrations and cards and money. He took her to a long rail and tied her up securely before shedding off her tack and with a jam jar full of white lumpy paint, drew a number onto her dusty brown side.

It was not until he left her, and the day shed into night, and the long, long rails of the huge farming area were filled with other horses in equal predicaments did she realise that, like the ships in the harbour, she too was roped and in her docks, awaiting to sail out. She was barcoded and all.

Dozens of young boys descended upon the full but still filling lines of horses. Promised a dime if they worked for the two days the large market ran for. They watered her and oiled her hooves, brushed her coat shiny and scratched the grit from the corners of her eyes. They touched up her number and put shoe polish on her nose and along the powerful arch of her back to make her look better.

Then the buyers come. God, do they annoy worse than biting flies! Yanking their fingers into her mouth to see how old she was, because while the man will lie and say she was a sprightly two, the teeth always say truth and reveal her grand total of five.

And they check her hooves and legs for wear, her back for sways and face for disease. All in all, she notices quite a lot jotting down her number, making sure they take an interest in this 'two hundred and nineteen' tomorrow.

When the auctioning begins.

The slamming of the hammer and clapping of the crowd started at seven 'o'clock that morning. It is in three hours' time that the call comes for horses two hundred to two hundred and twenty to start being prepared. Do they leap into action! Not the shoe polish boys of yesterday, but the men from the corrals, back at her side, smoothing and shining and feeding a nice bag of oats to keep her in a good mood.

For the difference between fifteen and fifty is just in how many rich buyers' eyes she catches.

And soon, two hundred and eighteen is sold for fourth three and walked out the ring, now owned by the Patriot army, who has people on their behalf in the crowd purchasing platoons of horses for their long drop, sharp stop cause.

At last, the man in the ring comes for her lead and takes her from the hands of the corral men. She swipes her tail as she passes one and manages to get him in the eye; she is more than thankful to be out of their mangy care. They should be charged for theft, she had an owner- she had just been between places really…taking a break…

That's when it hit here. When she escapes, will she be running for Satan or for her herd?

She is lead around the saw dust ring, the auctioneer starting to ramble off.

Satan was the whole reason she was in this mess, she was devoted to him for a reason unknown to even herself. But that had been over a year ago.

A few white cards are flashed.

The herd, they had grown large and strong, brave and just like the mustang's of legend under her care. They would have learnt from her too, they certainly watched her closely enough.

A slam of a hammer.

Satan forgets her, Satan doesn't need her like the herd does...did...

A polite but tired clap and she is lead off.

What does she want? She was raised on the frontier, she realised long ago that she was not the true leader of the herd, just filling in for the right mare to grow into the role. The quick witted white mare would be the one that successes her, and she had no problems with that. At least she was an actual mustang, not some saddled up pet.

What is she? Who is she? What does she want?

She does not know who brought her, but it was for nine.

After all, no amount of polish can hide the bullet hole scars along her left side and the deeper one, because it was at point blank, on her right back thigh. No feather duster can camouflage the years worth of maiming on her back from where infections had crept under her saddle and settled into the burns and tearing underneath it.

She was, all in all, a perfect picture.

Of a destroyed beast.


	10. Chapter 10

"I told ya's she would go for crumbs."

"Is no good, these are all the posh peoples, they wouldn't know a good beast, they only look for the pretty faces."

"Whadya we do then?"

"We turn the guy down."

"But sir wanted them all sold!"

"Not for nine stinking coins! That's thievery, that is. Look fellows, I've been trying to tell sir that the corrals should keep her, she would make a golden horse out mustering the left over herds. Think of the prize money if we entered the gal in rodeos or for those races across the frontier. You can win a thousand coins in those things, and let me tell you when I rode her here she was chomping at the bit to go faster the entire ride! She's worth her weight in gold and I say we'd be mad not to keep her."

"But we've got surplus horses already."

"None as good as her though, Jimmy, she's the most powerful Percheron I've ever seen. Just think how promising the foals out of her could be, if we get her with a good sire."

"That Monmouth farmer's grey?"

"Exactly! That stallion's legendary, and she will soon be too. Come on guys, you can't honestly fault her beyond her hide."

"She's got a vicious streak to her Sam, I must tell you I was happy to hear she was going. She sets me on edge when she studies you with those eyes of hers. It's like she understands what you're sayin' to her."

"She's a loaded cannon, Sam, the man who owned her before lost her to the mustangs, what's going to stop that from happening again?"

"Men, when you look back on this day, will you be happy with what you decided? Think about it fellows, it's better to take risks, than none at all. What did you 'come a muster for? It wasn't for the safety; I can tell you that, so what can you tell ye selves?"

"Well, let us think on it Sam, we're staying in the city for the next five days. We'll make our decision then."

"But the buyer will want her before then."

"We're turning him down no matter what we decided, nine coins is barely enough for a goat. This decision is about keeping her for the corrals or not. You know Sam, there is always those rodeo sales where they ride the horse after the steer before they sell, people would be jumping for her after that."

"No, I want to keep her, don't you guess get it? She's one in a million."

Many days past and no one came for her. Her rented loose box stunk of fish from the seafood market that was next to the stable yard. Oh did she hate it, and it only got worse when a new shipment of beast arrived. A load of camels, what cruelty, she despises them. Every horse does, there is just something evil and sour about those animals. The entire species. Pity on the fool who tends to them.

The Yorktown harbour was a busy place, and her time was mostly entertaining as she listening intently to the conversations and bustle of the markets and docks through the iron walls of her stall. The mothers and children, the husbands and soldiers, the town crier and the men working at their stalls.

She considered it an experience that she would not have minded much if she had been a year or so younger, but now it just infuriated her. How she _hated_ them and their sleep breaking voices that screech worse than the owls at night. She thought the sound of the wolves starting their hunt was more calming then the slaps of the mothers as they disciplined their crying toddlers.

One of the corral men came, he patted her.

She tried to bite him.

He just a laughed at her and left.

She neighed after her about how much of a bastard he was for leaving her to stand and rage days away from her life. Pathetic man, do not try and think yourself better than me!

Only Satan is allowed to think that, and that is for the simple reason that he _was._

On September 5, a battle started to froth out in the waters. The distant scream of cannons stirred her alive with memories of her own experience, running down the necks of those great animals, starring into their dark mouths. No fear, cold and knowing like the man that was perched upon her massive withers.

The town quickly fled screaming, she listened as bottles smashed and the clatter of a hundred carts all trying to be dragged to safety at the once time down the one street. The stampeding feet of the people was pounding all around her. So were the impacts of the cannons.

One of the walls further down the barn was blown away as a cannon ball fired, she heard all the screams of the horses as they were embedded with shrapnel or simply crushed.

Screams… the music of war.

It is not common practice to bother saving the animals. That usual led to the freaked out horses bolting or charging, wasting time better spent and creating unnecessary injuries.

It chilled her how level headed and undeterred she was with the threat of impending doom. All ready she could smell the beginnings of fire as the ships started to break through the defences. They were aiming for the fort that was nested in the harbour.

She was just standing there, listening to the pain filled voices of others and the disappearing stampede of people, the last just now peppering away leaving only soldiers grunting as they wrestled invaders and troops.

The sight of flames creeping under the entrance to the barn was what finally sparked her into action.

Nibbling at the lock on her door, she tried to mimic what the humans did, not a hard feat considering that the average horse could figure it out as well. Walking out of her stall she lazily plodded through the enormous barn, licking open locks for the other horses in the barn that were too panic stricken to figure it out on their own.

Even the camels, though she shuddered at herself afterwards.

The barn was starting to turn cloudy and dark, only the warm glow of the flames under the entrance doors visible through the smoke. Starting for it at a canter, she decided split second that she would have to charge it and run through the flames outside.

And as she speed closer and closer, her thoughts were not too nervous at all, it was like she had failed to fully grasp the danger she was in, even now as she lower her head and slammed into the doors with her shoulder.

What she was thinking about as she ran through the flames, the tips of her hair lighting like candles, was of how dismayed it made her that most of the horses had stayed stubbornly in their stables, confused with what was going on and seeking the safety of their stall walls rather than the hot, smoking danger of outside. There was nothing she could do for them; at least they could run if they wanted to.

Quickly she flew off about the docks, weaving through fires and on most occasions having to squeeze her eyes and lungs and charge through them. She though she saw Satan one time, outlines in orange as he too fled injured through the bombed port. But of course, he was not their, for when she re doubled in surprise he had disappeared.

Why was she seeing Satan? Why not her mother or the globe carrying human who has changed her life so much? Why not the candy stallion or members of the herd.

Herd. She had never called them family, had see. All they were to her was an interesting turn of events, a challenge, something to test the extent of her cunning with. Damn she was a shallow foul horse.

She dived into the first glimpse of water she caught, the icy ocean drowning where she had been aflame and searing new pain into her cuts and burns. She kicked desperately alongside the shore, fighting the swirling, smashing waves of the crackling, crying night. She never stopped until she made it out of the battling harbour. As they got further and further behind her, she dared to spare an ear and listen closely, to the last shouts of the soldiers as they loaded cannons and fought above her on the walls.

Creeping out of the ocean dripping, she struck a stride and followed the lines of the sea, certain that if only she held to the sand and followed its curves along, she would make it to the countryside and be away with it all.

From a distance she turned and watched the entire harbour dismantle into flames. She tried to block out the screams that cut through the midnight air. And it struck her then, like a blade to the fatty part of the chest, that she had been the only one to make it out.

She turned and ran, oily tears of horror and post trauma bubbling along her neck as she racing away and through Yorktown. The buildings became a blur of dark black colours as she raced, mindlessly following the cobbled, stilled arteries of the city.

She knew why she was so calm, she understood now.

She had been so scared that she had gone numb.

With Satan in the war, she was empty of fear, now alone in the cannon fire, she was filled with nothing but it.

What could make her change so much, from demon to duckling? Because Satan wasn't there? But she remembers how she had not cared for him; he had just been a spark to her riot.

Turning down an alleyway, she found a pile of hay amongst the fences and the grass, crying and heaving she took shuddering breathes.

It was because back then, she had nothing to live for, and was not afraid to die.

Now though, while the twin demons death and danger chased at her heels, she had regrets and desperate aches to do more.

She wanted to find Satan; she had wanted to live to see the granted glory of next day. She had become greedy for life, because it had started to look so much more promising than ever before.

In the next days after the battle, the lost livestock was rounded out of their city hiding spots and taken to the town square to be re-claimed.

When the carrel man lept for joy upon finding her, she couldn't help but see him in a fond light for the first time. She had never known that she was this precious to him.

"Thank the lord good gal, I thought you had burned for sure. They can't argue with this, this is god's intention plain and clear to even the blindest man. You gonna make me the richest muster alive!"

Oh, maybe not then.

But still, he was rather funny.

And she was just glad to see the granted glory of next day.


	11. Chapter 11

The town hummed all around her as the carrel men lead her up to the starting line. Her prodigious bulk tensed as she sensed the equal amounts of panic and hope in the air. The menfolk patted her up and down, thumping their paws on her neck with such glitzy nerves that she swore they were bound tighter than coils.

Backing out was impossible now, on all sides, she was boxed in by lathering, apprehensive horses, some tensing and twisting, jolting her aside. She was not too chagrined by their unapologetic raucousness because she was the largest in the line-up, it was more like they were bouncing off her rather than pushing her aside. She was the only Shire horse there by the looks of the rows, full of crossed thoroughbreds and tamed mustangs.

It was like all the horses across the frontier had been brought to Johnsons Hall in John's Town. People were packed together in torrential crowds on the verandas of the manor; some young, sprightly ones had climbed onto the roofs of the buildings in the rural square to have the best view when the race started.

Children were darting around and squeaking in shrill glee for all the sugar treats that were being sold and all the legs to hide from mothers behind. The apples trees danced on the tossing wind above everyone's heads.

Mothers were darting around and hissing for their runaway children to get back to their side, for they may get caught under the horses when the starting bell sounded. When the best beasts from Massachusetts to New Jersey all leap for the sky and beyond.

A race from John's town to Valley Forge, something that normally took a good horse a day.

The record was six hours, the corral men were sure she was going to halve it. They had double the prize money for the race on her.

No pressure.

They checked her girt for the hundredth time that hour and fiddled with her bridle. All at once people were mounting the horses on either side, and she felt her new rider do the same.

Most of the riders were children and skinny men, light people that would not weigh the horses down. The corral men were not light or small in any definition of the world; they were all brawn and heavy with horrible riding styles. Styles that keep one in his seat when charging down a vertical slope after a mustang stallion, indeed, but not one that enabled their horse for a speedy and easy riding.

They had contracted someone else for the job. The lady's tan hands soothed along her mane and muttered words that she was sure were not really meant for her. The men had found her trying to steal from the corrals, and her scrawny frame had saved her from being handed over to the military like many caught savages were, or worse. She swivelled her ear back to listen to the native woman as she continued her mutters, the girl knew as much herself, how lucky she was that the men had a need that required a bond of trust on each end of the deal.

For the men didn't want the woman to ride their promising horse for the overgrown banks in the Diamond Basin instead of finishing the race for them. And she didn't want to be betrayed to the slave masters in the cities.

Quickly everyone but the riders peeled out of the area and pushed the crowd behind where the hay bales had been stacked to serve as pop up barriers. A horrible sound clanked throughout the air and all the other horses' lept forward and streamed ahead. She stayed, working her hooves into the dirt, not knowing what was going on and spinning around to look for the source of the alarming sound. Her rider was equally bemused, having just been flung into the settler world scare weeks ago. From the way people were laughing and the carrel men were screaming, they both figured it out and lept forward after the unbroken wave of meat if only to escape the humiliation of the ebullient crowd.

The stupid savage riding the fat, big horse. It had been humours when you saw them waiting at the line beside all the others, the sleek racers and stayers. Oh, but the topping on the cake, the rider being a native, well rumoured to not know what horse are, never having come into contact with the animal which they were reported to have labelled 'sacred dogs' until white man arrived and started his colonies.

And it was a woman! With feathers dancing from in her hair even when she wore some oversized cotton clothes loaned to her.

And so the sight of them standing startled while the field raced away, it was enough to make even the most sympathetic and pleasing man chuckle under his breathe.

She did not care for them, she knew that they would be proven wrong in the end, making the victory only sweeter, but her rider did not. She could feel the heat of shame radiating from the native woman, the girl did not know of the potential of her ride yet. She had had no other horse to compare her to, so did not know of the remarkable strength she was crouched upon.

Already they had past five other racers. In a long distance race, passing someone has a very different feeling to it. You can just hear the judgement.

"They will burn out and I will pass them again in half an hours' time,"

"They aren't pacing themselves, they will soon tire"

"What arrogance"

She thinks it all one big joke; there is a wicked smile on her snout as she faces a few others that have started to drop back from the meat ball. Soon the races will start to spread out; soon her chance will come for her to weave through and bound ahead without a care. She is more driven then before to win this now, and the sensation of tears dropping down on her shoulders affirm her decision.

Half the record. Consider it done.

She's not racing the horses anymore; she can't judge how well she is running by them because right now she is racing a phantom that must be at least half a mile in front of her if the time is to be believed.

She cracks past a pack of racing horses, reaching her top speed but then finding another gear. She is the first horse by a comfortable length, but that does not make her pause. The phantom horse is still in front.

Turning a bend, she sees that there is a group of people that start to cheer when they see the first horse. They are there for the very practical reason to make sure that no one is taking short cuts, but also to send word in Morse code to the other packs of people like there's that dot all along the race course, huddled in their hunting cabins and trading posts. So is the festive spirit of the annual race season.

She enjoys watching how their faces flattened when they finally get a good look at the outlandish combination of her and her rider. Chuckling as she passes, she knew they must be quietening even more while they wait patiently for the next horse to come around the bend…they were waiting for quite a while for the favourite to finally appear, neck and neck with almost every horse else.

(Shire horse. Favourite. Benny's Buckskin. Old Hill. Monmouth's grey. Jayden's.)

She needed to cover a third of the race every hour, time was scare and the weakness that was starting to split up and down her sides was not to be listened to. So instead she listened to her rider mumble and kneed her sweaty shoulders and neck with her palms.

The woman was not upset with confusion and humiliation anymore, instead she was upset about the laboured breathing for her horse and for the speed she had taken which seemed unreasonable.

She would not listen, she was doing this, and no one could stop her, no matter how kind and Satan looking they were.

Perhaps they were from the same tribe. They must know each other then. Why was she stealing supplies from the corrals, on the sub-wild edge of the frontier instead of in her tribal valley?

Many questions, no answers, she just kept on running.

An hour.

Another.

A river, twenty three more posts of shocked upon shocked people.

(Shire horse. Hour gap. Benny's Buckskin. Monmouth's grey. Two minutes. Jayden's. Five minutes. Old Hill. Favourite.)

Right on the birth of the third hour, she thundered into Valley Forge.

This was where she had to be careful now as she stumbled over the line, she has seen many die, one midstride. He was galloping one moment, and the next, dead before he even touched the ground as he crumpled and crashed like no collision you've ever seen.

But most of the time it is after the run that they die. They are heaving like her now, trying to catch their breath, struggling to, not being able to, why can't I catch my breath? Why can't I breathe?

I'm not breathing…

She's not breathing…

The woman jumped down, she has noticed, with nimble fingers the woman all but throws the saddle and bridle off, trying to push her and get her to lie down in the dirt.

Collapsing, she focuses on keeping her throat open and chest moving. The woman is chucking buckets of water over her steaming sides.

People give them a wide birth, a strange combination, one they do not know how to approach, one that is convulsing in the dirt and one that is running with a bucket from the river back to the fallen beast's side.

The telegram is sent that the winner has arrived, a Shire horse and native rider, three hours and seven minutes after the commencing of the race.

She can almost hear the corral men whooping in their joy from here, back where they are in John's Town. But she does not care, the one she did it for is beside her, quiet and deathly with concern, scowling and frowning at her like she had just done something terrible against her.

She closes her eyes and just focuses on breathing.


	12. Chapter 12

His face and tail were stark white, but his legs and mane were so black she thought them apart of the night around him. The rest of his coat looked like someone had poured frothing milk over it, the bubbles bursting and staining him white in an intense mosaic.

So this is what they call dappled grey. There was something different about this horse, she had seen many dapples and greys, but none had seemed to glean her attention like this one. There was something different to him, humming under his hide.

The corral man that had ridden her down to Monmouth led her into the pasture. It encompassed one sad tree and a sleeping flock of sheep tucked away in the corner.

And a stallion that was eyeing his new companion with interest. She looked at him in turn, and when their eyes meet, she felt a jolt of unknown course through her.

That was the first time a horse had ever made eye contact with her.

She tried to bite the man, but he was used to her way of parting and danced out of her teeth's reach. She snorted at him as he and the farmer stood on the other side of the fence and watched. Good god, did they think that her and the stallion would mate and be done within the second?

He was coming over at a sedated pace, and she made sure that for every step he took towards her she took one away. As if, she snorted to the men. As if she was letting this strange grey anywhere near her.

A very_ s_trange grey.

Half an hour later, he was still walking with calm steps after her, and she was still, with head high, walking away for him. They had worn a track around the inside of the fence and past the annoyed flock of sheep by now. She was curious as to why he had not tried to charge her like stallions do when things do not go their way.

Why, she had seen it far too many times. A stallion's mission in life is to mate, whether a human or brick wall was is in the way or not. She was well prepared to keep out of her reach until the men gave up on their courtship… but then he said something.

"Are you the one that won the race to Valley Forge?" She halted and spun around.

"Yeah I am." She said, thrilled. "I've never meet another horse that could talk before," she shouted out to him and started to make her way over to where he had stopped. He mustn't be so bad if he is like her.

He gave her a sharp look.

"I fail to believe that,"

She turned her head to the side in question.

"Why?"

"Well, because every horse can talk."

She laughed at him.

"No they can't."

"Ah, yeah they can." His look was sharper than glass and she returned it in kind, bemused by the obviously crazy stallion.

She paused and thought it over. Thinking back; how had the candy stallion know what she meant when she screamed for him to take the herd and run for the canyon?

"Well no one's every talked to me." She said, a strange note of sadness leaking into her voice.

"That's because you're intimidation." He said, suddenly close, he must have walked over when she was in thought.

"What?" she asked puzzled. He gave her a flat look, ears folding down in agitation.

"Who raised you?" He finally decided on asking. She thought back and realised, she couldn't exactly say a woman with a golden globe. He understood that her silence meant no body.

"Well this would be funny if it weren't so sad."

She snarled at him, she was not something to be pitied.

"Laws of horse society," the stallion started as he turned and walked back to the miserable tree. "Do not make eye contact or talk to anyone who is more powerful that you. They will tell you what to do, and you shall listen and not question." He came to the tree and turned around to her as she walked up to his side. "No one's ever taught you that; have they?"

"It doesn't exist, I am the way I am because of some human magic I was expose to while I was young. Besides, how can you explain how much smarter I always am then everybody else?" He sighed at her.

"Because they were all awaiting instructions and busy avoiding eye contact."

"I've lived with mustangs for over a year, they never talked to me and I've never heard anyone talk to others." She was getting angry now, surely she has to be special, how else does she explain…everything.

"Because you're always in earshot, when they do slip up you pass it off as a humans talking, because you've lead them and never talked so they took the hint and never talked either. It's common for some horses to ask that their herds never talk, it makes them more submissive."

"But I wasn't like that! They shouldn't have been afraid of me, I was, before, they had..."

If the cruel mare of before had wanted them to stay quiet, if she had beaten silence into them, maybe they were just too scarred to fully heal over?

"But I'm so much stronger and faster than every other horse, how do you explain that?"

"Most of the time it is because they don't want to beat you and challenge your leadership."

"But I am stronger, look at how I won that race; I've always been different like that."

"Yeah, and the next race two weeks after that you had fired up so many prideful racers that _every horse in that race beat the record."_

She stared at him, not believing it.

"Why would we run our fullest for a greedy man? Once you got those horses personally interested in winning, they take on a whole new disposure."

"But I am more intelligence, I'm faster…"

"The only thing you have got more of is spirit."

"Spirit?" She questioned him, eyeing his serious face. "Spirit means _nothing_," she hissed. He only shook his head, making his black mane flop.

"No, spirit means _everything_."

She turned to him, searching for the cracks in his lies.

"Why has no one challenged me then? Why has no one slipped up? Why has no one ever been _my_ leader?"

"Because your talent isn't wits or muscle power, it's leading. Haven't you noticed? You're a natural leader."

It wasn't until morning that she realised; he must be the first horse in her entire life that has not submitted to her presence let alone fury.

Which must make him, one of the only.

Over the next week, she had the best time of her life. Finally being able to talk to someone, being able to ask questions and tell stories, make jokes, point out facts, insult, tease, it was great fun. Liberating in a way.

She trotted over to where he was grazing.

"I was thinking, since no one has ever been brave enough to bother; could you name me?" His head shoot up and he gave her a scrunched up look.

"No."

"Why not? I need a name, I always thought it weird, but because it seemed that nobody else had names I thought that it was just normal and only a human thing. Please?"

"No, naming you is something a parent should do and I don't really want_ that_ sort of relationship with you."

"Why no? You can teach me all about the horse world that I've been missing out on. Do we have secret meeting places? Or clubs? Do we have passwords?"

"Ah, no meeting places but there are clubs which they have to- wait, no. I just don't want to do that, you figure it out on you're own! You're more than equipped."

She huffed and stood grumpily by his side for a moment.

"Fine."

She watched him graze.

"So what's your name?"

"Max."

"Well okay Max, I'll come and tell you mine name when I've found it."

He smiled. "I'll look forward to it."


	13. Chapter 13

She tested Max's theory, and she found, while he was partly right, he was also partly wrong.

Because when she said strong, she didn't mean 'I can pull a wagon on my own' she meant 'I've fought off fifty rustlers and they had to wait for backup to control me'.

And when she said fast, she didn't mean 'but I always seem to win' she meant 'I've made it across the frontier in a night'.

She did her research and found, while those horses did indeed all beat the record, none even came close to halving it.

She thinks, there is a lot more to this, a hell of a lot more that needs to be unearthed.

And the men are entering her into race after race, not even two days between some. For weeks she bares the pain that comes with the mounting exhausting and no opportunity to really rest. Are they planning to run her into the ground? They certainly seem to be, it's only the cold hearted as hell woman that looks out for her health most nights.

Ah, that cold hearted woman, she had known something was going on, but she couldn't figure out what.

And then, one day, she disappeared.

And never came back.

"Is being afraid wrong?" Her woman had asked her once. She had huffed at the woman in response and went back to wading through the shallows of the lake.

The Native had been resting in a tree that reached out over the sparkling water. So well hidden amongst the fruit laden branches that her swinging bare legs were all that was seen of her.

Her woman had been in one of those moods which she liked to listen in on.

"When did fear become bad? Isn't it natural?"

This particular topic was something that she herself was very interested in. She had sloshed closer and paid keen attention to the woman's conversation with her ghosts.

"Who is braver, a man who fears and fights, or a man who feels no fear and fights?"

Lying down, half in the grey greasy mud of the bank and half in the warm summertime water, she had pricked her ears and hoped her woman continued to think out loud.

Ever since the fire at the Yorktown harbour, she has been plagued with her own questions about what she was.

"Is the opposite of fear courage or is it joy?"

And Max's words kept echoing back to her. How she was never what she believed she was. How she had never been special or sacred.

(But she was….but…he didn't understand the full extend…it can't just be spirit, surly…)

"Do we fear our death or do we fear losing everything that we love?"

Her woman, dressed in colonial boy clothes, had crept gracefully down from the tree and came over to her. She watched intrigued as the woman's raven hair curled and circled around in the winds rather vicious howls of that particular afternoon.

Her woman had stood up then, and away from the lake, she had followed, heaving her form up from the shore and walking after the human. She watched as the girl climbing her way up into the canopy above, with her brown shorts rolled up to her knees and navy blue coat flapping behind her when she jumped. All that was to be seen of her before she disappeared was the fleeting image of dancing loose hair.

Spying an inviting, moist patch of periwinkle that was mimicking a pelt of downy fur, she crumbled into it and decided that she would stay here and sleep the day away until her woman returns. For the woman always returns, the tent and fire site mere meters away evidence enough of that.

But she did not return, not that night or any other.

She told the draft horses that brought in the supplies for the corrals, to tell her immediately if they see her woman on their trips into the towns. They nodded and she knew that it would be done.

Her woman had hated the corral men and refused to have to rely on them, even though they tired as hard as hell to get her to be dependent on them. How they did ever try to drive all the game out of the area and trample her home while she was away.

Where would she have gone? The men do not know, but her woman has told her.

She goes back to the empty long-houses in her valley and sits, crying out names. Her family has gone, and she must not have wanted to follow, or maybe she got separated or lost them. Maybe she was abandoned by them or exiled. She does not know, but she will stand a vigilant watch over the remorseful body of her woman as her mind is transported away in sorrow.

The only one left. Alone forever. No one to talk to in the language that comes most naturally to you. No one to trust.

That was how she had felt before she met Max and he opened the gate to the well hidden world of the horses to her. Isolated.

She wishes she could find Satan and show her that there is another wondering the white man's domain. Two lost souls. But she does not know where Satan is, even though she has been looking out for clues since the harbour fire.

All she knows is that he was last seen helping George Washington with hunting down a betrayer.

The distant yells of the corral men could be heard on the wind, accompanied by the angry sounds of the captured mustangs. How she longed to break them out of the hell hole, but that would jeopardise her.

But every night she was thinking up new schemes in her head on how to break every horse out and leave none behind. Every plan different and relying on an awful lot of luck.

Until the time came that the draft horses did good on their promise.

"We saw her in New York, she was working for the man at the shop that we stopped at."

"Did you get the name?"

"No, sorry, I couldn't read the shops sign."

"That's okay, what was around it."

"I really can't remember, my blinkers hide all the buildings from me."

She paces up and down the corrals all day. She knows where her woman is and she has to hurry otherwise she might move and be lost forever again. Up and down, up and down, through the clouds of dust that are made by the struggling mustangs, ignoring the tortured beasts that watched her from their prisons. She turns her head when the carrel men sling their whips and spurs with a sadist amount of glee.

On the eighth hour, she makes a decision.

In the dead of night, she weasels her out of her locked cage and gets to work. Moving with precision, she whispers the plan to every horse before opening their stalls.

"Stay quiet, stay slow; start to seep out only after I have freed everyone, so that if the men are alerted, I will not be forced to leave anyone behind."

Under a sliver of moon, she walks out of the cursed corral, a dribble of horses walking with forced control after her and back to freedom.

She can feel them breathing with unconcealed love for the wild that has stretched out before them. When they are far enough away, she nickers that they can go, and it's like someone has flicked a switch, the transformation bleeding instantaneous.

The night is filled with the roar of over a hundred horses all galloping away, the crashing and snapping of the forest as they pass through it and disappear under its outstretched limps and giant grass blades.

One of the draft horses turns back and wishes her farewell with a parting neigh.

"I hope you find her, chief."

She considers the domino gelding, his hairy hooves feathering around him as he turns to run with the last of the others. She calls after him,

"So do I."

She is very, very happy that she had stressed the quiet and slow part of the escape, for if they had not waited until they were far away from the cursed place, then they would have indeed awoken and drawn the men. And they would have brought their ropes and guns, and the fight would have been impossible to win.

And that is one chapter of her life; over so simply it astounds her. If she had not put over ten months of thought into the escape, waiting for word of the disappeared woman, learning how to unlock the stalls so well it takes a second, it would never have been so smooth. It is a chapter she does not wish to repeat. The races had been constant and hard, the repayment small and measly. Week after week, her sores were just piling up on top of each other and the men were never giving her time to rest and heal.

Even now, when she's heavily pregnant, they were still debating whether or not to run her in the coming New York to Boston race. Those utterly retarded fools.

Taking up great lungful's she starts at a rocking gait down a small deer path and away from the sleeping men in the now empty corrals. She traces the bank of the lake down. Hare's jump out of her path and one especially stupid one runs under her hooves in its panic. She snuffles in amusement as it gets flipped over by her mulching hooves, but quickly feels an ache of sadness when she realises, had Satan been there, he would have dropped down and skinned the animal.

She misses him, only he had ever ridden her right. With respect. With a business of excitement that went into his every destination. Her woman cared for her and she wishes to return the favour, but she can never come close to Satan.

The woman is a friend, while Satan is a familiar.

It's been over three years, yet still she remembers those thrilling, perfect, fleeting days she had with him.

Racing through the forest, a new road of freedom stretching out before her, she entertains the idea of taking her woman to Satan's homestead once this is over. But you see, first she needs to remember how to get there.

At least for now, she can enjoy the sensation of running. It never tires, it still makes her muscles sing with pleasure and adrenaline pump with just the sound of the wind let along anything more stimulation like the pounding or elk racing through the shadows alongside her.

But the blasted thing is, lately when she runs it feels like she is pulling along an anvil with her stomach alone. The hard little hooves of her child dig into the spaces between her ribs and force her to slow to a walk.

At this pace, she will make it to New York in three days. Puffing after trying to keep her speed slow when she came down a hill, she crosses the river out of Black Creek and into Valley Forge.

Little did she know, that tomorrow she will be in front of a firing line, desperately dancing away from the shredding teeth of the bullets. Wilfully leaving Satan on the ground where she had knocked him.


	14. Chapter 14

The town is asleep; a restless dog runs over to her but does not bark. The sounds of the night, the cries of babies, crackles of fires and the ever humming calls of the insects and hunting birds of the night.

The steady plod of her hooves punctures through them. Her footfalls thump the compacted dirt and feel like they are echoing and shimmering down the sides of the fort. She cuts her way straight through it, coming out on the other side and crossing the little dirt bridge.

Before she may have taken into the forest instead of sticking to the trails. Made a direct route of her own. But she does not dare, because it she encounter a hunting wolf, she cannot run them off her tail like she has done so many a time.

So instead she picks her feet up and tenderly tries the feel of a trot.

Oh wouldn't it be sights, to be traveling alone on that hot night, to round a bend in the small dirt travel and see her coming down towards you. Clip clopping, rising up and down, her swollen sides swaying back and forth with the movement of the jog. Eyes half closed in ides and thoughts, mindlessly following the trail through no matter how much her heels are foot from the extra weight.

If she was impressive and intimidation before, now she is more so, huger and outlined almost in a hungry fashion by the moon and forest shadows. Riderless, bare, alone, a man would assume her wild or escaped. Dangerous, uncontrollable, unknown.

But there is no one to see her image, for it is the dead of night and for, indeed, it is the dead of nowhere.

The squirrels and owls regard her though, along with the raccoons and foxes as they hunt. Slowly the morning chips into the night.

When Lexington draws closer, at around seven in the morning, instead of plodding straight through it like she did with the fort, she goes around its outside. There would be men and woman out and about on the farms and taverns who are more than ready to race out and capture her when she trots past. Some may even recognise her; she does cut a very rememberable figure.

Skirting around the outside, she passes many pens of animals, but one particular lot of goats draws her attention.

There is a stillborn baby on the ground with the heartbroken mother still kneeled by its always-dead side still trying to lick it awake.

She shudders and moves on. At least she knows hers is alive; it kicks and squirms, bruising her kidneys and hitting the underside of her spine.

For now.

That afternoon in the Scotch Plains a patrol of soldiers spots her starts to advance. She looks at the horse which is carrying the captain over.

"Don't you dare."

She stops short, afraid. Another law of horse society is to never blame the steed, blame the rider. Why is she angry at her then? She continued to trot on and away from the patrol, the captain tells them to keep on marching while he fetches the loose horse.

He comes after her.

She ignores him.

He rides up beside her, tries to grab for the lone halter around her head and…

Smack! She twists and gets a mouthful of his royal attire, rearing and jerking him off the saddle she lets him fall to the ground from the high back of his graceful mouth.

She trots on, the other horse whines in good humour at the sequence of events and continues to dart out of the captain's reach when he goes to get back on.

She tosses her head to the young mare as a thank you.

She snorts her 'you're welcome'.

The great barrier fence of New York draw closer and she wonders, will it be easier or harder to move around in the city with no rider? Holding her breath she passes through the gate and eyes people around, watching for any reaction to her and she trots deeper and deeper in the monstrous city.

It seems that in the city, everyone assumes that someone else is taking care of it and passes her off with a flick of the hand. Excellent.

It's when she's passing by a large crowd outside a hall that she smells it. It's been a long time, and a lot has changed, but still, she recognises like the day he was shooting people dead from her back.

Satan.

She spins and looks and finds him, like always, only out of the corner of her eye. He had just finished killing two guards behind a building after they had dragged him there. Fools.

She was not letting him get away.

Lunging after him as he absorbed in and out of the crowd, the men who had been misfortunate enough to be standing in her way were down lying winded in the dust. The masses of people all gathering parting in screaming waves before her. She turned a corner. Satan was nowhere to be seen.

Frustrated, she turned to a pair of horses that had been hitched to a waiting carriage on the corner.

"Where did the man with the arrows on his back go?"

They quickly replied to her.

"Left."

"Left."

No one dares lie to the chief horse.

The streets were quieter down here, she could smell his fresh trail now that is was not mingled with the crowd. He was heading for the docks, for the salt and the seagulls and the boats which she could not follow him onto.

And she charged down those cobble roads, feeling the thrill of old times, catching sight of him just before he disappeared around a corner again.

Down on the wharfs, he walked, just enough for her to nearly catch up…just…enough…

And then Satan spied someone, they spied him too, because he was suddenly running and pushing people aside. She follows, her hooves striking and flicking a loose nail up behind her from the salty sea side boards.

Satan slips down on to a lower part of the dock; she keeps running alongside him from above.

That's when the grenade goes off. It had been amongst a pile of crates and broken sails, she got floored by the shock wave and collapsed as she went boneless.

People were running and cursing when she struggled to her feet again. Everyone was running, the man just off the ships with his suitcase, the woman with a paper full of fish. It made Satan harder to track down now that he was not the only running human.

There he was, down further, nearly around the corner.

She wanted to scream.

Stay still!

Turn around and see me!

Recognise me.

See how much I have been through just to return to you.

All she wanted to do was ram him, topple him over and yell in his face. Damn Satan, god of all things painful and sinful, damn you and your pathetic flights of fancy. And that's for leaving me with those bodies and freaked out horses nearly three years ago. And this is for disappearing off the face of the earth for those three years. And this is for letting the thrill of the chase control you rather than become a part of you.

He's charging for a firing line of soldiers when she materializes behind him (she's running that fast, powered on fury and oiled by a sense of self-justice) she reaches him and topples him over with her shoulder. She stands over his aggravated and fallen body; she is equally enraged as he is.

The eyes widen and there is that familiar sound of recognition. She has her name. Lucky Girl.

The clicking of the firing lines guns fill the air around them, and she understands a bit too late that they are still aiming, they are still going to shoot…

She can take bullets with clenched teeth, but what of the one inside her, nestled and defenceless and weak in every way? It's a moment that is brilliant with blurring speed but also in slow motion all at once, she spins on the tips of her heels and yanks her body behind one of the many sheds. She feels like she's got whiplash, like her eyeballs were left behind, the amount of ferocious power that she put into throwing her body to safety.

Satan does the same, but in the other direction. He rolls and falls down over the side of the wharf onto a lower section, making all the men fishing scatter as the guns follow his liquid movements. He runs vaults over the other side and in the direction his prey had fled for.

She may be bulletproof, but her child is not.

Watching the man chase like a bloodhound on the scent of dinner, she's hurt but had guessed that he would care so little.

See you on the other side, Satan, she promises to his disappearing shadow.

She has promises to keep that come before helping the suicidal man in his mortifying missions. At least he knows she's here and, more importantly, that she's _cranky._


	15. Chapter 15

The hum from the explosion was still biting throughout her muscles as she walked off the docks, bending her huge bulk through the shipping freight that sat stacked in piles. Her black hooves made an interesting array of sounds as they passed from the stone of the wharf to the rejected wood that had bandaged where the original had caved in. Black ship rats and many different types of man scuttled around her, from wigs to beanies to the tricorn sailor's hat. She got thrown the odd glance but none spared her any thing askin to a whole second of thought.

The jar of the explosion was making her senses dull and slurred, but at the same time, she became hypo sensitive towards the useless going on around her. The patterns of colours, the thudding as a man hammered a broken wall of a steel shed. The hiss spits of cats that lounged above on the window sills and amongst the flowerpots.

Quickly the landscaped around her body (which had started to sweat from the aching waves that she was familiar with) evolved and folded neatly into that of an open market space, filled with beggars and pickpocketing children. Rows of firearms stood alongside smoking beds of silver and black fish.

Lucky Girl…

Well, she was lucky.

Shoppers went about their hurried business through the tables and baskets of turnips, apples, potatoes and corn. The odd free roaming pig would come snuffling up beside them searching for dropped treats.

As she passed on the outskirts of the howling market, a young maiden in a dirty blue dress reached out curiously and stroked her twitching, huge side as she drew by like an ocean liner does to the bobbing fishing boat.

Soldiers stormed by, glaring and hurried for their destination, their buttons and weapons clanking upon one another. She past them by, she passed them all, the dog that sniffed and licked at the road's cracked for crumbs, the gruff cobbler, the sad window maker, the happy roof repairer, the suspicious rebellion organiser, the tired wives and the ignorant children . She noticed a horse waiting up ahead over a hay bin, pawing at the ground in eagerness for a rider to take up his reins.

Coming up, she approached the deep chestnut gelding. She nudged clucking, schizophrenic chickens from under her hooves. A man's ferocious voice cried out oven the noise of the town,_ ...it's for me! Please tell me… you stuffed it up again?..._

Flags dangled overhead, casting blot like shadows. Whispering conversations were being held on the side of the main street and posters littered the mouths of the alleyways, smoking men leaning sick and tired against the bricks beside them.

"How do I get to the nearest store?" She asked the other horse as she finally got close enough to be heard over the awful noise of the busy square.

He chucked his head up to the majestic building of justice behind him, the bricks of the tower the same colour as his coat.

"Past that, go left than, right at the tree. Just keep following this guttered road along." She nodded her thanks.

When moving under the shadow of the justice building, she admired the stone creatures that reared up on the roof. Still, she gave it a wide birth, as did everyone on the street. Not during the most vicious throws of the rebellion, one did not dare.

Even if one was a horse.

Because she felt like any other solider that had bore the coat of arms. She felt like her names was still in their register, just waiting to pop out again and damn her.

Every step felt like an impact in its self, her muscles clenching painfully again. Had she been poisoned?

Dodging around a horseless parked carriage she breathed slowly through her snout in an effort to calm her pounding heart. Small drips of rain started to be tossed down by the sky, light enough to begin with but eventually thickening until you could see the charging rolls of them clearly in the air. The streets emptied as people hurried under overhands and to their homes or tavern, stall owners hurriedly tossed blankets and tarps over their goods.

She went dark and shiny under the rain's pattering hands, but continued to hobble on through the empting streets; she followed the main street, lavished with the rare sight of gutters that were now starting to swell with storm water. She snorted at town cries that still yelled stubbornly about 'supporting your community', the latest disaster and of the current books that were available at the stores to the hurrying, drawn jacket people.

She come to the tree, busting out of the stone, crocked and alone.

Coming up to another horse that had been tied out in the rain, she asked them the same questions, though less polite because her jaws was clenched to easy the feel of her whole body throbbing.

"Keep going until you see the city give way to land, then go left, you might have to go a few steps back because you have usually overshoot the turn once you register the land."

She thanked them with a head shake, making her overgrown mane dangle down and stick onto the wet sides of her neck.

Later, she asked another horse.

"Follow this road until it forks, instead of sticking to it, go through the gaps in the buildings corners which should be straight ahead of you. You come into farm land and then walk right until you get back onto the road."

"Keep going straight ahead; it should appear on your left soon."

The shop, the last one in all of Boston that she had left to check, was on a heavily rat infested corner of the city. A wagon pulled by sad, thin looking hoses past by the shop as she arrived, stepping daintily up on to the deck that surrounded the shop; she pressed her face to the foggy glass window and looked in.

A fire roared inside as the people prepared for the first chills of the coming winter, lanterns hung from the roof, animating the room while the outside stood still in its stormy, dark afternoon. In the pigeon holds rested clutters of cotton reels and bottles of spirits and medicine. Proud, massive antlers were mounted on one of the mouldy, sagely walls.

A woman stood with her back to her, measuring something on a golden scale. Even though the window, she could just _feel_ the smells of the shop, the musk, smoke and dust.

The woman was surrounded by bags of grains and towering piles of furs. She didn't need to turn around for her to be able to recognise her woman.

She really needed to name this person.

Sage. It was the colour of the shops walls, but also a perfect word to describe the schooled face of the tribe member.

Sage turned and saw her, the wise young woman hurried out and into the pouring storm. She was overjoyed to see the ever settled face of the woman now turned into a confused and concerned frown. Her neat eyebrows knitted together in a cute sort of fury.

Suddenly, agony ricocheted throughout her, and she realised then, that this was not from the explosion.

Sage rested her hands on her soaked and cold skin, realising quicker than what the actual mother had as to what was actually going on.


	16. Chapter 16

It seemed like its ears had yet to pop out of its head, the way it lay crumbled and confused and weak. Still wet and gooey even after it had been evicted from her safe haven gut, from the soup it had appeared in and grown from.

It gave a weak cry for help, and she was amazed at how instantly she complied with the useless animal's wails.

Open up your eyes little one.

The tearing, body changing pain of the birth was numbed by her desperate love for the extension of her that had now become its own.

The fog rolled into Boston thick and congratulating, the hammering of rain against the storerooms tin shed a fine addition to the first hours of night.

Her son's head shifted, then topped back down onto the floor from the unexpected weigh. She didn't know what colour he was yet, still black with wetness and dark with youth. All she knew was that he was the most gorgeous horse that has ever, and will ever, walk this world.

The world…she watched his eyes peel open in exhaustion and she wondered how it must feel to truly believe that the world was as big as a supply room, that the world was nothing more than fog and the soothing sound of rain. Nothing more than crates and a warm mother and a bow headed native who was watching the crucial first moments from a respectful distance.

Instinct demanded that he stand, so the foal shot up into the air before crashing back down. She watched with interest as his eyes gleamed with a new found thrill. Everything was new; everything was leagues out of what could be imagined. Nothing can stop him, everything can and will be done.

Within the hour he was standing up, trying out his new legs which were as long as her own.

So disturbingly proportioned, she thought. Legs long enough for an adult but a body that was the same size as her head. His tiny soft hooves created a rattling sound on the left over tin sheets, a clatter on the stone and thuds on the dirt floor which was slick in birth water. He was intrigued. He looked back at her.

A name… why did it feel like she was now endlessly naming things?

Her own mother had been taken away to work in the hot, sooty mine shafts too early for her to learn much from the horse. She couldn't remember what she looked like let alone what the dam had named her.

All she remembers of her mother is a hero, a guardian, a sanctuary, a shield, an infinite glow of love. Would her own son see her this way too? Did boys remember their mothers different to girls? Did boys need fathers? What was she meant to do about that?

Over the night, he dried, revealing a colour that was much like vanilla cake batter. He looked to be wearing black socks, yanked up just over his knees, and his hooves shone like polished leather shoes.

When the owner of the shop came in the morning, he yelled at Sage for something, smacking her over the head. She felt her anger flare, but daren't more from her sleeping foal's side.

But then he advanced on her tottering baby and proceeded to try to fling the young colt up, off on his way and out of the warm store room.

Tried.

He was smashed up against a wall, a chuck of his arm missing and one foot twisted the wrong way before Sage stepped in, bravely putting her body between an enraged mother and an abusing slave user that had been beating her not a minute ago.

She realised what deep, horrible trouble she had gotten both of them into and so when she watched the man straighten behind Sage's back, a hand over where his blood was spilling down from his crown, in a way, she had spared Sage the agony of deciding if she should flee back to the frontier with the horse that seemed to have followed her, or stay a slave in Boston.

She was willing to risk the man hunts and bear attacks now that she saw the growing fury in her master's eyes.

Sage slapped him across the face and kneed him in the groin, leaving him doubled over as she stalked out onto the street, locking the store room door behind her. She nuzzled her shoulder to show her approval.

She kept an eye on her child as they all walked through the busy early morning of the town, shifty eyed and anticipating a group of soldiers to jump out and grab them. The buildings and roads were clean and fresh after the night time storm, leaving heavy grey clouds but a clear air. Her son was trying out the smells on his velvet snout and trying out the sounds and sight, committing them to memory.

She was trying out names.

Rodger, Tim, Cigarette, George, England… she was just reading the signs along the street, searching for any name. Hancock, Child, Bayland…

The frontier was in sight, all they had to do was walk past the fortress walls. It used to be easy, as lone horse, or even with Satan, a richly dressed man who always had an air of intimidation, but Sage was quickly bared from leaving.

She looked every bit the slave, her appearance and her clothes, and slaves were not allowed to leave without their master's permission.

Any other time she would have encouraged the woman to jump upon her back and she would have charge through the barricade, easily running what ever mounted solider they sent after them into exhaustion.

But, there is a foal barely a day old, his face pressed into her side like he wished to disappear. He hadn't gone over a trot, let along the thundered pace that should would set, a pace that would be too much for a fine grown mount of the cavalry let along a child.

But, he is her son…

No. She mustn't push him, she does not want him to break or fall like many newborns have done, still frail with holes throughout their growing bones. Still yet to grow all their teeth and brain.

They turned back for the city and waited outside a tavern while Sage slipped in. Her son curiously sniffed the other horses, boldly approaching the strangers.

"A beautiful son," one old mare told her, she nodded her head in thanks.

"Do you know of any nice names?" She asked her, the old mare thought.

"David?"

She shook her head. She did not like that one.

"Jonah?" A brown paint added from where he had been listening in.

"Oh!" quirked the old mare in memory. "What about Samuel, dearie? It's after a horse that saved by life." She hummed about it, but wasn't sure.

"You want bible names, then you should choose Noah, he saved us all once, you know, and they say it will happen again. One day, lady, we will all be protected by God's words and, one day, the flood will come and wash away all our sins."

She looked into the gelding's clouding eyes and felt like she could see what he was seeing, all the sins he had seen, all the horrors and tragedies. All the loss and pain he had been forced to watch. An obedient animal, a witness to it all.

A low, whispering voice came from behind them.

"Where I came from, God is feared not gossiped about." It was a great shire horse (like her, and, she realised, now her son) who was hitched to an open wagon piled full of stones for the buildings. His sides were spilt open, old and new, by the bloodied whip that sat in his master's hand.

He was getting old, by the looks of the grey in his mane and coat, but showed no signs of submission or tire.

"Then what would you suppose I name my child?" She asked him, looking deep into his eyes which sparkled anew.

"Hearn," he said finally, before being flogged and heaving the over weighed carriage down the road, never getting the time to explain why.

She trusted that it was a good reason.

"Well what do you think, Hearn?" She asked the wide eyed newborn. Hearn only jumped at the sound of the whip lashing into the old, great stallion, from far down the busy street.

She had never hoped to hide him from the cruel fate of horse kind, but expose it to him so he knew, and was wise enough to avoid it. But not this early.

The horses around started muttering the name and calling out to Hearn, chuckling when he nearly stumbled over his long legs.

Sage came out of the tavern, a new look of cold determination and iron glee plastered on her face. She led two strong men down to the fortress walls and for the soldiers that guarded the gateway.

She recognised the insignia on their shoulders and gun holders.

Assassins.

She nudged her foal close and kept them both hidden amongst the others.

This was about to get _ugly._


	17. Chapter 17

Nimbly she led her foal through the carnage of the border were bodies and guts are strewn about in every which corner. The soldier's cherry red coats were now all stained a darker shade.

She tried to slide Hearn's eyes desperately, tried to hide him from it, but the bodies were on all sides, and there was only so much her desperately flicking tail could conceal as she tried to shield his view with it.

At least they weren't still screaming like back…during the war…

She had been doing well suppressing her worst memories, of the war and the harbour fire.

Coming out into the midway between the frontier and Boston, she noticed a large number of terrified horses had started to regroup together. One pricked his ears up when he saw her, his shoulder flexing. She could see that he recognised her, but was not brave (or alpha) enough to call out to her as she strode past with her chocolate-cream child.

"What is it?" She asked gently, diverting and coming over to where he was standing a bit out from the huddle of horses.

"You're that endurance racer, I know you-"He stopped short in realisation, glancing around quickly and talking again, but more urgent.

"You gotta run quick, they're after you, they're all after you now. You know the men that kept you? They're offering _fifteen thousand_ for you to be returned."

"What? That's enough to buy up all the land in the Concord!" She said, aghast.

"That's why you got to run, lady, disappear until they forget what the record shatter of the frontier looks like." He nodded down to her son. "And they've got even more of a reward for him."

A man came riding through on his way into Boston at that very moment, she watched closely as his eyes lit up upon seeing her and instantly yanked his horse over in her direction.

"A thousand thankyous," she said to the horse breathlessly.

Before she would have taken for the forest and have lost the man easily as she ate up the sloped, haggard ground while the farm horse did not. But she could not do that; because, what of the newborn currently sniffing at this weird thing called grass? If he was having panic attacks from the simple way the grass was swallowing up his tiny hooves, then how the hell could she realistically expect him to leap over the rocks and ravines, the fallen trees and streams, and to disappear with her amongst the trunks and brambles of the Scotch Plains?

There were cougars amongst the rocks, elk in the pines and bobcats stalking the slopes, all perfectly capable of killing her young in one swipe.

"Distract the man!" She yelled out to the group, starting to trot for the tree line, tail flaring out behind her and jumbled baby lurching after her in another new sensation, this one called running.

"Keep him away from me!"

They did just that, crowding him and barricading him in much the same way that the corral men had done back as her final fight as a mustang.

Hearn squealed as they disappeared and weaved into the forest, struggling to pull himself up the steepening ground behind her. She was careful to choose the safest path through the forest, following along the road, but from through the leaves and undergrowth.

Her son meet his first bird.

His first thorn.

His first raccoon.

His first stream.

His first waterfall.

His first deer.

And from the distance, he saw his first camp fire. She chucked as his eyes locked onto the dancing flame, swimming with wonder. When the call of an animal echoed throughout the forest she would tell him its name, because he couldn't talk or understand now, but soon, dreadfully yet amazingly soon, he will be chattering along in her wake.

Or maybe he will be a quiet child, serious and thoughtful. She turned back to watch as Hearn sniffed at a mushroom, accidentally leaned too far and touched it, screamed in terror of the unexpected sensation of it touching his curious little snout, raced back to her side, slipping on the dew covered leaf litter of the late autumn and ending up sprawled and tangled on the ground.

Hmm.

She touched his heaving little ribs, sniffing him for any blood, before nudging him back up onto his tiny, wobbly feet.

Where were they going? Well, winter was only a few days away, already clouds full of snow were starting to grow and there were deep blankets of frost in the mornings. She knew that they could not survive as wild during the winter, she did not know how to get running water, find food and keep from freezing out as she slept.

So she was blurringly marching them for the only one she had in her life which was not wondering around, busy slipping away from under her watchful eye or untraceable at the present moment.

Max.

But could she make it to Monmouth before the threatening deep winter set in?


	18. Chapter 18

She felt it coming; she saw the first pioneer flakes drift down. The skeletons of the forest shuddered around them as the freezing winds picked up and dragged at their branches.

So she marches through the night; the pin pricks of countless upon zillions of stars spinning above them in their blue and purple tar. A wolf howled, closer than she would have liked.

"Wolf," she absentmindedly named the animal to her tired child.

"Woldf?" He repeated back to her.

"Wolf." She corrected him gently.

Other howls joined the first.

"Wolfs?" Her son offered. She shook her head.

"Wolves."

She marched him on, making him walk beside her instead of behind, scared that he would fall back without her knowing or would be picked off by a hunter.

She could see how tired and worn he was, ears drooped, head lowered, legs barely picking up off the ground. She nuzzled him when he started to slow down.

"Just a little further."

She had been saying that for the entire night, always just a little bit more. But she needed him to walk, she needed them to hurry, because the snow fell like it was just breaths away from falling, end then they would not be walking, they would be ploughing.

One step will feel like three hundred then. That's why she had to press her young child so hard.

And she looked up from her child to see the slow, mystical start of the winter snow fall. Little chills where creeping along her back from where they had landed and become nestled. Hearn was too tired to truly marvel at his first snow, had experienced too many first to be that amazed by the falling crystals. It was a sad testament to how cruel she was being to the foal, weeks old, that the sight of the star shimmered snow dusting sparked no smile.

He looked up at her and marched his gaze to hers. His soft brown eyes teared from his confused at why his mother would be making him do this, and with the exhausting his small body was being wrecked with.

She wanted to stop and curl him up against her and let him sleep blissfully like he always does but she can never do.

Put she couldn't, she had to press on. They had to press on.

"Just a little further."

The land was all white, but not deep, when they finally made it. She walked around the fence line, recognising the huddled sheep and sad looking tree. This was the place, so where was the one she was looking for?

Her son fit under the boards of the fence with ease and was walking on the other side, inside the paddock. She nearly had a heart attack when she saw him, wondering, stumbling really, along out of her reach. He was separated, out of her protection.

She felt herself lock tight when she took in his blue lips and ice encrusted lashes. He was cold, he was freezing, he was _frozen._

Most foals his age had not wondered out of their barns yet, but here he was, from Boston to Monmouth, such a long journey it was that most humans brought ferry passage rather than suffer the laborious and long ride.

She approached the stables that lay a bit off from the house. She kept a wary eye on the human's nest, praying that they would not catch her. Because then all of this would have been for nothing, and they would be taken back to the corrals, and then her child would grow surrounded by the kind of harsh, careless, greedy type of human she desperately wished to protect him from.

She pressed her face up against the stable door. It was cruel, how she could feel the warmth and smell of the soft hay beds leaking out, but had no way of getting her shivering, drained, _exhausted _foal inside.

The chains rattled almost merrily as she tried to force the door open.

"Who's there?" She heard a sleepy voice yawn from inside. She didn't recognise him instantly, after all they were only the barest of friends.

"Goddamn it Max, open his fucking door right now or so help me." When he realised who it was, she could just sense the sudden smirk.

"Or what?" He asked her, his heavy footfalls coming up to the other side. "What could you possibly do?" She all but hissed at him. Growling through her clench teeth, angry, but quiet.

"I've got a kid here dancing with hypothermia. We've come all the way here from Boston, and he's going to die soon if I can't find him shelter from the snow. That's what's going to happen."

There was a pause.

"The doors chained, I can't do anything about it."

She felt her spirits break in half, all this way, so far, so much, so close, yet still it looks like her foal will be claimed by the winter like she had feared.

How she had fear it, with all her heart.

"But there is a hole around the side, if we try and paw it out the kid might be able to get through."

"Where? Quickly." She said, casting a look back to were her child had fallen down in the snow some meters off.

"Down the left,"

She raced around to the other side of the barn, finding the hole he had mentioned. It looked like it was something the farm dog had created to get in and out. Desperately she started digging at it with her two front hooves, kicking the snow and soil up. She saw Max's own hooves through the gap, doing the same thing.

She went back for Hearn, nuzzling him up again, feeling like he was walking dead on his legs. It was a wonder he was still moving. He looked passed out, he looked…

He was completely wiped, she realised. This was not the last drops of his energy, this was days later, after you had used them all up and sapped everything else that god knew. He was falling unconscious, he was walking on instinctive drive alone.

She was not surprised that, when he crawled down into the hole, he passed out. She tried to push his body as far through as possible, but still he was exposed.

She watched as Max's muzzle came into view and bit into her baby's tiny shoulder, dragging him the rest of the way through.

Sure it would bleed and wound him, but it was something that could heal. Hypothermia would not.

"Shit, he's cold," she heard Max say from the other side as he pulled the limp foal into one of the warmest corners he could find. She listen to the rustle as Max nosed hay up around him, creating a nest, before laying down beside Hearn and trying to warm him up.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered, tears leaking and freezing upon her face.

Easing down, she laid so that she sealed the hole, stopping any warmth of inside from being sapped out.

"So've you found you name yet?" Max asked quietly, his voice carrying far because it was the only noise in the late night beside her quiet, hitching breathes has she sobbed in guilt.

"Lucky Girl," she told him hoarsely. He hummed.

"Makes sense, you're damn lucky to have gotten here, just in time too."

"No," she said. "If I was truly lucky, then I wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place."

There was a hour of silence which was thick with the dangling ends of a reply. It felt like he had been trying to gather the courage to ask her something but always stopped sort. Finally, he asked her,

"Is he mine?"

"Of course," she whispered, in the shallows of sleep already, entire body now covered in a blanket of snow. Her large, muscular side flinched, making the resting snow cascade down. She thanked god for her heavy winter coat, then cursed him for what he had made her do to her own foal. She finally fell asleep for the first time in that entire harrowing week. The sound of Max gently nuzzling more warm hay onto their son's resting body lulled her into the depths of rest.

Sighing, she slept.


	19. Chapter 19

Day break was coming later and later. By the time the purples and yellows of morning had started to shine their way through the heavy clouds of the recent snow storms, she was usually already awake and had started to pace throughout the fridges forest edge nearby.

The glow of the tavern's lantern's in the distance constantly caught her eye, and she watched the three horses waiting at the troughs outside while their riders rested and drank.

_That would be a good source of information_, she thought, thinking about all the types of horses that would come through the tavern and what they would be willing to share with her.

An elk call rippled throughout the dawn air, making her ears flick around as she tried to pinpoint the direction it was coming from. There were tonnes of those great, lardy, hairy beast in these woods. She had even watched a bold few come out of the woods and eat at the bales of hay left out for the farmer's livestock. One had even tried to eat from the troughs outside the tavern, but ended up hitting his massive antlers on the wall and scrapping the wooden window pane.

They were always just inside the concealing woodlands, pacing around and waiting for a chance to nick the food from under the noses of the less diligent few. Or , in some stag's cases, to charge and fight anything that threatened their herds.

She rested in a scattering of bushes, all turned coppery and in some cases bare by the winter. Staying still, she observed a convoy pass by on the road down to the Monmouth fort. After the British had been evicted from the colonies a month ago, there had been shipment after shipment coming into the fort as the Patriots moved their own materials into the now unoccupied military position.

She eyed the horses that were with them, tethered to the back of the carriage or being ridden alongside by relocating recruits. They were all very strong looking, formidable; obviously some of the best the new 'United Nations' had to offer.

One of the biggest stag's in the area came up behind her, and watched them alongside her, his breathe creating huge clouds that drifted down. He was used to her presence, a ghostly horse that was hanging onto the edges, one foot in the forest, hiding, another in the fields across the road.

"Just making sure they know I'm here." He said to her, grunting low and moving his head so this antlers shone when a solider looked his way.

"I don't think they would be considering challenging you," I assured the stag, who was constantly shielding his herd from trouble even when there seemed to be none.

"I don't like the look of that bay stallion." He told me flatly, eyeing one of the horses being ridden at the end of the six carriages conveys, still to pass them. She had to admit, the bay did indeed have a commandeering presence.

"Why would they hurt your herd?" she asked him. "They might just come hunting for you now that you've shown them you're here." He snorted a cloud out into the air and turned to leave after staring the convoy away.

"This all used to be my land, my father's land, his father's land. But then the humans came up, started building and chopping." He looked over the roofs of the village in the distance, remorse in his beady eyes. "Give them an inch and they will take forty more." With that he walked back into the deep snow, seamlessly blending back into the pines and birches.

She wonders; domestic animals and wild animals are very different to one another. The ideas of inheritance and family loyalty are something had had ever heard about until she started to talk with the elk. Those values are unfathomable for domestic animals, to own land, to take care of your child and grandchildren even after they have grown.

She had always believed that once her child came of riding age and the humans took him off to market, that would be the end of it, it has always been the end of it for her society. They go their way, you go yours, well done you survived motherhood, now you're back working like a dog or back into the next stallion's paddock, bearing the next child. Life goes on.

And then you just, move on, just like she moves on from her mother, from her life pulling the carriages for the peddler around the frontier, from the war, from the mustangs, from the corrals, from Boston, New York…you move on.

But ever since she heard of this foreign value, of staying in contact, of continuing to help one another out, of being there. Well, she can't help but hope that wherever he is sold ends up being to the farm next door.

Who's she kidding, her son is growing into a fine horse, watch him outrun the other elk young and clamber up the rocks, just watch him, he will be sold to the highest bid and taken for great, great things in distant, distant lands.

That is, if they capture him.

And so far, they haven't.

She hears a crashing as a wild, crazy animal comes pounding through the snow behind her.

"Who were they, Mother?" Hearn asks her, drawing up to her side and collapsing down in the undergrowth beside her.

"New horse for the fort," she tells him, wondering what he has been doing to get so puffed and flushed. He glances at her and smiles cheekily.

"I was chasing rabbits."

"Rabbits?" she repeats, raising an eyebrow. He nods enthusiastically in all his young child glory, his lithe white mane with its curious black roots, splayed around him by the hurried action.

"One day I'm going to beat father, and then I'm going to go off and race just like him!"

She hummed and watched as the small, ant like figures of the convoy disappeared down the slope.

"The elder stag is weary of them,"

"Who? Janguwitti?" Her son asked her, she moaned.

"The stag, the eldest one; for the last time Hearn, I don't know their names."

"Sorry," he apologised to her instantly like all little children did, like they had been physically slapped with the slipped anger of their parent. She chastised herself for snapping so quickly.

It just grated at here when he talked about the elk herd, expecting her to understand why it was so funny when she-has-no-idea slid and crashed into your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine.

May it was because he was raised with the elk…no, _is_ being raised with the elk. But even Max gets along with the town edge elk, getting there insufferable jokes and ritualistically tossing part of his hay over the fence for them every morning.

She supposed, Max was raised alongside the Monmouth forest edge just as their son is being, but her…

She was raised by a native, old woman, who upon thinking back, the clearer it got.

She had a little camp up on the tree's hallows, she had always hidden when the farmer came down to fetch her, she had protected the golden globe with her life until, suddenly, there was no life to her.

She had been old, and broken, and senile in a way, singing and recalling tales to her over the fire. Constantly there, but lost, like an exiled warrior sent on a suicidal quest. Maybe it was to retrieve the ball? But maybe she could not get back to her tribe after her leg had come off in the steel hunting trap?

Yes, that might explain why she liked the native people so much and everything else so little. They had been the only ones to comfort her.

And when she thinks back, she realises, that while she says she moves on from everything, onto the next circle, the next wheel, the next stage, had she really moved on from Satan, or Sage for that matter?

No, she hadn't.


	20. Chapter 20

She nuzzled Hearn from where he was, watching an owl hop along and disappear into a hallow in the dense pine branches above.

"I'm going to catch up on the latest gossip around the tavern, you want to come?"

"Sure!" He chirped, jumping up as she heaved herself onto her feet, feeling like a huge overturned carriage.

"You know," she started as they walked down the road together, "I'm actually better at racing that you father." He blew a raspberry in disbelief.

"Then how come he goes to the races while all you do is hide around corners, gossiping?"

"There's people after me, Hearn," she tells him, whispering it close to him and acting all dramatic, glancing over her shoulder to add to the effect.

"I don't think there is, mother." He tells her pointedly, sending her a look that clearly says 'you're crazy.'"

"No, no, they are after me, they are after you too, but just don't know what you look like."

She started talking all sorts to the horses at the tavern, they themselves more than eager to trade what they knew for what she did. Her son quickly became bored, and upon spotting some of his weird elk friends watching him amongst the branches, said goodbye and galloped away.

He was safer with them in the forest, then with her at the tavern, anyway.

"But I heard that he died in the pub in Lexington, not here in Monmouth."

"No, no, you've got it all jumbled up, the guy was killed in Monmouth, and two days later an injured guy that _looked _like he _should_ be dead appeared in Lexington, asking for aid."

"Ah," she said to the helpful gelding. It made sense, if Satan had killed his target in Monmouth, got injured and was trying to get back to his homestead but overestimated the journey, logically he would stumble into Lexington looking for their local surgeon.

"So any more news on the bloody bow carried?" She asked (for that was what he was called in the horse circles).

"He's been healing in Lexington, but recently left, only a few weeks ago, if I am to be sure. I was a horrific wound, stabbed right through, in one end out the other. Or so Marceline tells me."

She was about to ask another question when a solider rode past, tethering his mount who was decked in the patriot colours, and going inside to inspect a possible rowdiness complaint.

She recognised the bay stallion of before.

"Working you already?" She asked him curiously.

"Yeah," he replied, startled at being addressed by the huddled group of what looked like tired, sway back nags. "I suppose they must have been itching to try out the new wares." He added with a verging on vain chuckle.

She sympathised with what he had said, when with the corral men, she had felt more like a shiny coin then the actual being she was. He looked at them, seeing that the other two were obviously tied to the hay bins with their owners inside. But he perked his ears curiously when he saw her bare body and brambled mane.

"Where do you belong?" He asked, she tilted her head back for the prominent figure of the barn up the slope in the distance.

"In the forest, besides that barn." His eyes widened.

"You wild?"

"No, just loose."

"How long you been un maned for?"

"Well…I lost by true master many years ago, and it's just been a great big wonder, for a while I was held by men that had snatched me from the forest, but I've gotten rid of them."

"Oh, so sorry about that."

"Don't be, I'm starting to find leads on where by true master is at the moment."

"No, about the wondering, I would hate to have to survive out there."

Her and the other two horses chucked, it did look a sight, the stallion built like a mountain talking fearfully of the wild.

"You mustn't be a frontier horse then."

"No I'm not, and honestly this place is scaring the hide off of me."

A man stumbled out, still fixing his hat up, and mounted one of the two horses that she had been talking to originally.

"It was good to talk," the gelding told her as he rode away into the carved out trail that lead up into Packanack. With the horse gone from between them, she watched intrigued as he shamelessly ran his eyes all over her. _Well, well,_ she thought, _someone's a bit too bold with the mares._

His solider rider came out, straight after the other, probably having been the one to kick the other guy out of the warmth of the underbelly tavern. His human struggling onto his tall back, the stallion nodded her farewell.

"The forest beside that barn up there, I'll remember that, miss."

And with that he was ridden down a track where the forest pressed in at all sides, she snorted as he arrogantly held his head, trying to look proud and manly.

His hooves still stumbled a bit though.

She wonder if she had been right to tell him where she spent most of her time, with Max away for many days at a winter race in New Jersey. After all, this bay was a stallion, and a rather big headed, over confident one at that, even before he had spied the loveliness of her.

She bid goodbye to the horse at the tavern, starting back for her homeland patch of woods. She felt a conundrum hanging in the deep winter air as she watch the stallion look back at her once more from the snowed in forest before he was ridden around the corner.


	21. Chapter 21

"Mother, Heydayya wants me to come with him when he does his first rite of passage. Can I go?"

"What?"

"Haydayya, you know, that guy that's my _best friend_. For his first rite of passage, that's in the pools up in Panacack, they are supposed to take someone they consider their bestest, bestest, friend and he wants me to go and be his god sibling. Please mother, this means so much to me!"

She stared at him for a heart beat.

"What are you guys doing, how long?" She asked, concerned. "I need to talk to his mother about this. Are you going to be stuck in some sort of strange elk contact for the rest of your life?"

"Mother, no, all it means is that we look out for each other and help each other, and we already do that anyway." He grumbled as I made him lead me to his 'best friend's' mother.

We found her stripping some bark off a tree with her son. Hearn moped as he walked up to his 'best friend'.

"My mother's being all weird about it." The 'best friend's' mother glanced up at her, sending a warm smile her way.

"Well, I guess I must be strange for your mother, horses don't really have much of a concept for loyalty or friendship." She reasoned sweetly.

Ouch. I'll get her back for that.

"It's okay;" she said to me, coming over so we had a private conversation while my son sniffed the bark that his 'best friend' was eating curiously. "It's nothing more than them just promising that they have each other's backs. Look that it this way- your son is gaining a valuable protector. I'll have you know that my son is promising to grow into one of the strongest, fiercest stags this side of the basin."

"And I'll have you know that my child is no runt either," she gritted back to the suffocating elk mother. "The only problem I have with this is that my _son_ is going to be taken _far away_ by animals I _don't know._" She stressed, trying to make the elk understand the true problem.

Her jaw worked as she came to understand that the resentment was not to her elk religion, but to the safety of my child.

"I assure you, your foal matters as much to our elk gang as much as our own calves. And he will be perfectly safe, we do not usually interact with the stags in this area but on this rite the father and the uncles of the child take the boy and his wished god friend to the pools. He will be more than safe under the guidance of them, they are very wise. I sure you have met my boys father, Janguwitti, before."

"The paranoid one?"

"He is vigilant and strong, no harm will come."

She nodded, realising that this may be for the better now that she had an interested stallion on my scent. Take him away, a squad of fifteen point body guards, no harm.

"Okay," she told the elk mother, watching the way Hearn was chasing his elk friend around the bases of the trees. _God, is it bad that I cannot bother to attempt to pronounce my son's closest friend's name?_

"They start at the night fall," the elk mother said, turning to leave. It was midday now, as she watched the blissful children.

"Just keep him," she replied with a swirl of her over grown tail. "When can I expect him back?"

"In four cycles time," said, with a gesture that she suppose would be considered a polite farewell in elk talk. She turned back for her homeland patch, watching as her sons eyes lit up as the mother elk told him about the arrangements.

_Good._ She thought. _So I had my son away for four days, Max due back in two and all that time to sort out my own issues._

That night, she watched keenly as, like in all the night before, the shadow of the bay stallion slipped out from the fort gates. He had been caught, spooked off by a fox and driven back by a hail storm the last three nights he had tried to reach her, but this time he looked more determined than usual.

She walked down, meeting him halfway, resolving to nip this trouble in the bud. And if indeed she did have to bite him to drive his interests off her, then so be. She had to punish many in her mustang herd, when bullies started to crop up and hormonal teenagers started to cause trouble. She remembered a particular time where she had been usually vicious, it was a colt on the brink of stallion hood, and in his new rushes he was trying to mate with mares that were his aunts or sisters.

She is sure he will carry those scars to his death, the fight he had put up until running, defeated, away. Off to join bachelor groups that she knows roams the fringes.

Will her son ever… No, never. He is nothing like that boy….but in under a year he will be growing out of her control…what will she do then? Tell Max to deal with it, probably.

The bay stallion's eyes gleamed when he saw he making her way down the slope towards him. She wouldn't call it predator, but there was a very hunter like steak to his steps that made her glare. She was already claimed by another stallion, and to be trying to advance on her while he was away was cowardly in her book.

"I want to ask you a question." He said to her, picking up his pace and trotting over, trying his best to fan out his tail and tense his muscles in a grand display.

"Well it must be important," she replied, realising why she hates stallions and will always hate them. Even Max ticked her off sometimes. She was beginning to pray that her son was gelded.

"I offer my oath in mateship," he started, confirming her fears. She had heard the same old spiel before. "I'll protect you from everything and-"

"No." She told him flatly, hoping the harsh drop would work, and started on her way back home in an effort to show she was _not interested_ and that this discussion was _over_.


	22. Chapter 22

"Wait, what?" He asked, running up to her side and nudging her shoulder flirtatiously. His only experience with rejection must be when they play hard to get, she realised.

Must have been a stud stallion back where he came from, she thought in horror. Great, that's the worst kind.

He nuzzled her again, his time on her neck. She lashed her tail and tried to snake around and bite him, but he twisted out of her range.

"What have I done wrong?" He asked her, growing angry now that he was obviously being denied.

"Your egotistically, your annoying, I am not interested." He looked puzzled.

"Right now?" He asked, raising his eyes as he questioned her. Obviously the only logical solution for him was that he was either pregnant or nursing her own foal at the moment.

"No, I just don't like you." She said truthfully (because Hearn had stopped nursing some weeks ago, so technically she was ready to bear another child again.) She paused and wondered what type of foal they would make. Sure the kid would be handsome, they both were lovely horses, but with her dryness and power and his brazen superiority, it would be disgusting.

Let alone the thought of letting him actually…ah jees…she stumbled in surprise as he suddenly rammed her into the fencing around a vegetable field. Hot breathe touched down on her winter chilled rump, making her twist in disgust. Kicking out and throwing her head around, she managed to throw him off her.

"Don't you dare." She spat at him, hunkering down into a position that looked more like a huge horned bull watching his opponent across the rodeo field than horse.

From the blood streaming from his lip and the way he was limping, he definitely wasn't.

He glared at her, feral and bitter, before limping off back to the fort, plan visibly being drawn up on his head.

The next night he tried sneaking up on her, he only just managed his forelegs partway on top of her back before she spun around and rained vengeance upon the stupid, hard headed fool. But that small success what enough to cheer him on to try again.

The next time he tried fighting her into submission, and if she had been a lesser horse by a fraction it would of worked. Ten minutes into the teeth cutting, purple bruising, lung burning and blood running fight, she realised that she couldn't win it if it continued. Mare, natural weaker than stallions, did not usually make it out of these situations well and good.

So she used her smarts to run and hide it out until he left. It was like a sick game to him, a challenge.

She cannot describe how purely glad she was when she saw that Max had returned. His familiar dapple grey bulk cantering up and down the fence line, she watched as he blissfully ran, enjoying the sensation of a romp around with no human clinging like an insect to his back.

It had been a long time like since she last felt a human upon hers that she almost wished, opposite to him, to be saddled up for a gruelling fast paced marathon.

He saw her coming over and trotted to the fence line, gleaming with news about what trophies he won and eternal enemies he put to rest.

Then he saw the partly healed marks of the fight last night, and all joy was soon wiped off his face.

"Who," he ask at once, eyes serious with anger and anticipation, because not just anyone can land a hit on her, let alone beat her to this point.

"A new stallion at the fort, he's been coming every night. The bastard."

"What about Hearn?" He asked as he looked at the distant figure of the fort, scandalised.

"The elk have taken him in, even before this all started, I am in debt it them. I cannot imagine what it would have been like if he had been with me throughout all this.

That night, she waited by Max as he jumped the fence and stood by her. She snorted when she saw the familiar sight of the bay stallion making his way up the slope. Max tensed and growled a sound subconscious and animalistic.

For the first time, she felt more towards him that just simple friendship or fellow parent-ship. She felt like she and him were two shoot out rangers, eying down the barrel of their pistols together at the lumbering baddy. For the first time, she allowed herself to relax and rely on him.

It didn't seem the right place for words as the two stallions faces off, but she chipped in anyway.

"I really am disgusted in you," she told him, finalising the fact that she was never letting him anywhere near him again.

"You might change your mind after I take now your precious stallion here." Max bore it silently, he didn't show any sign of having heard it.

"You won't." She told him with a large amount of certainty.

That's when the bay stallion lunged for Max.

And it was on.

She quickly fled for the forest, because it wasn't safe there and it was not even safe here. Stallion fights are miles wide, she had seen one start at Troy's Woods and end at the Concord, lasting days.

Because they haven't got a little line their not supposed to step out of, they have got everywhere, and they will use it. If one's strength is speed than why should he have to fight when he can just tease his opponent to exhaustion in a deathly gave of tag.

It's a fact, most of these stallion fights end only at moral injury or death. And she doesn't think that Max is letting the bay stallion out of this alive. Not by the look on his face.

The sounds of the fight still reached her, the shredding and pounding and low, groaning roars.

For indeed, stallions sounded much like lions when facing off.

What happens if Max did lose? He had just come back from gruelling race carnivals, he was in no condition to be in a stallion fight.

Slowly the sounds of the fight gathered and turned the corner, disappearing into the forest. Max must have planned the move, wanting to get the fight away from humans who might see and stop them, and for the added advantage of him knowing the forest while the bay was terrified of them.

She apologised to Max for getting him involved, but if he considered her his mare, then this was his responsibility to her.

Hey! She thought suddenly.

In the end, horses _did_ have concepts of loyalty.


	23. Chapter 23

Max had not come back yet, and it had been three days. Hearn had not come back yet, and it had been two.

She stood in the graveyard of the church, watching the rabbits eat at the grieving pots of picked flowers and absently watching as flakes drifted down in a newly started snowfall.

That's where the old elk found her; eyes half closed in thought, rump slanted as she rested all her weigh on only one side. Snow being caught like falling petals upon her strong back.

"I am sorry," the elk began when she looked up, white tumbling from where it had been nestled in her mane. That was when she understood something had gone terribly wrong.

"On their way back they were ambushed by a pack of humans. They had guns and nets and dogs. I'm terribly sorry."

She bore it silently, ears weak and dropped, the bruises of her fight aged yellow and green under her earthen like coat.

"This is the first time something of this magnitude has ever happened, all the bulls were slaughtered, but the young elk calf got away. He said that they had captured your foal, but were not showing any signs of harvesting his pelt like the others."

She heaved a quiet, sad breath. The cloud spilled out of her nostrils and tumbling down over the grave head before her.

"I understand," she said finally, croaky and tired. It was nobody's fault. The elk had lost more than she had. Some of their strongest, wisest protectors. Besides, her son would be fine.

He was a strong horse, you could see it even now, only a third grown, and the hunting party undoubtedly saw the potential as well.

The old elk bowed and left, knowing there was nothing that could possibly be done by trying to comfort the stranger. She stood. Still. Starting to look pure white from all the snow gathering upon her. Tiny hooves pattered over quietly and stood in the left over hoof prints of the old elk. She looked up to meet the red rimmed gaze of Hearn's best friend.

"Don't worry lady. I'll save Hearn. I promise." His lips were broken yet set as he held his head high, the birth of vengeance and the debt of promises shinning in his pupils. The beginning nubs of antlers were starting to peak from his head.

_I'll have you know that my son is promising to grow into one of the strongest, fiercest stags this side of the basin._

She offered the sight, of a boy trying to be a man, a watery smile.

"Thanks kid," she told him. "But I think it's better if we waited for Hearn to find his way back to Monmouth, rather than you find your way to every possible spot in the colonies."

She thought about the boats of horses she had seen shipped for places far flung. "Or maybe even further." She whispered.

"I promise you, I'll find him." He said, voice steely cold yet young. She brought her head up, pricked her ears, felt her shoulders and hips set back into place, felt the lenses that had been developing over her eyes shatter.

No, I promise _you_, I'll find him.

She can't believe she had forgotten who she was.

She had sabotaged a rustler base, she had run across the frontier in a night, she had lead mustangs throughout their own country, she has stared down the barrel of the harbour fire's gun, she has _rode Satan into war._

The elk calf waited in the peaceful snow with her, listening to the silence alongside her, understanding.

There was a disrupting, but harmonising to her, noise from the church as people starting up a gospel. The calf flinched and started back for the forest, casting her one fore longing glance. She had no doubt that he might become a prince; may even the king of the woods, but right now be was nothing more than an child the world had just freshly torn open.

And with a single step, he had all but disappeared back into the blacks and browns of the trees. Gone.

Just like everyone else in her life had done to her.

Who does she have now? No one.

And so, she took to the trail and left for Packanack, hoping that there would be horses up there who had been in the hunting party. Ones that she could talk to, get answers from, something.

She trodden down the shovelled out road, which quickly became nothing but packed and slushed ice from all the marching guards that had tracked through it. Up the trail, a man who was usually happy and chubby and bearded looked frantic and defeated. Slipping into the forest she watched a Max's owner walked past, eyes searching just as eagerly as they had many days ago, his lantern fighting to light his way through the growing snow fall.

She was now trawling through knee deep snow, leaving Monmouth's outskirts, trading the sound of goats butting their heads for that of the pine branches snapping under the weight of the mounting storm.

She would miss the warm, purring tabby cat from the barn and the dogs that inspected her attentive, with their watchful glossy eyes and dripping, lolling tongues. She would miss the tavern in the distance with its lanterns glowing all night, the bale of hays there for your picking and the bushes that have gone all coppery as the land had gone all white.

But, realistically, it was not like she was going to spend the rest of her life sighing as she hid in the elk infested woods, watching her stallion and foal live while she just froze in time.

Stalking up the rock slope, she felt angry as hot tears started their first suicides down her face and across her bristling, frosty cheeks.

Till the end of her days, that moment there, marching up against gravity but feeling like there was everything else and every thing bloody more weighing her down.

Till the end of her days, it had been the closest her heart had ever come to breaking.


	24. Chapter 24

She tackles through the crackling, twiggy density of the forest. Their little hard fingers tracing along her sides and through her mane like a crazy, scary lovers.

Her snout twitches as she follows the scent. It is a scent she wishes she did not have to follow, yet here she was. Because the best way to find a hunter, was to follow his kills.

The stench of blood and cracked open bone grew stronger.

She toes carefully along the small, snowy bank of the pool, its waterfall's pouring songs bouncing inside her ears. Bear paws litter the mud and snow, yet right now there are no sign of any. Odd, one would think that the smell of kills, strong enough for a horse to track down, would have undoubtedly drawn bears.

Especially this deep in prime bear territory.

And she draws up the hill, to see him, them, it.

They had been camping under the overhang, hiding out from the winter, keeping high to shot the bears before they came to close.

But it looks like one got close. Close enough…

She walks carefully up, almost dainty like in her steps, to examine the claw marks that have shredded the tents and cabin apart. A window is smashed to bits along the ground, canvas flaps uselessly and alone in this dead, dead day.

And the humans. Oh, the _humans_. Their remains are everywhere, hacked, attacked, coughed up, spread out like some child's proudly painted artwork.

She doesn't know how long she stood, marvelling, revealing…fretting.

This one guy, he's had his entire gut ripped out and spread across from one end of the camp to the other. She cranes her neck and quickly pulls it back revoltion when she realises the space between his ribs is just a chasm of sloshing, thick and clotted red.

Who did this? Where were they now? Could they do this again? Is her foal in danger? Is her stallion? Undoubtedly out there somewhere, wounded and wondering, or perhaps still fighting; weaken.

A warm, gloved hand lands on her thick shoulder. She jumps out of her skin at the surprise contact, pivoting on herself and swirling around, new adrenaline and fear caught up in the top rung of her throat.

Satan stares out at her from under the hood of his cloak, a twinkle of amusement would have been there is not for the carnage they had both been observing.

Fate, she reasons then, is a rather ugly bitch.

Satan turns and walks on, inspecting clues through the snow and rock ledges. He scales into the trees and crosses over the frozen stream into the some-what island in the inners of the pool. She watches him go, fluid and powerful in every movement. It has been a long time, she has nearly forgotten the awe of this man.

Watching him scratch around in the snow, she trips down the outlook and wades through the chilly waters, coming and standing by his side.

He looks to the dark mouth of a cave, tucked in the shadows of the mountain's foot.

She eyes it to, breath billowing out and caressing around her head like fog on a mirror.

He takes a step.

Without thinking, she takes one with him.

His hand comes up to her, barricading her from continuing forward. Before he moves on himself, slinking being the only word coming to mind as she watched him continue on and disappear.

_Okay then._ She thought. _I will wait._

Sometime later, so much so that her feet got snowed in. He comes back, the skinned and half way butchered body of a big black bear over his shoulder.

_He's huge!_ She thinks. _He's massive, he's a… he's a…_

She realises.

He's a man eater. _The _man eater.

Satan cuts the teeth out of the gums, the claws out of the bleeding tips of the bear's toes, and layer of the bear's fat, later to be cured into grease. He stashed them and finished peeling the pelt of the animal, leaving it pink, white and nothing more than a naked carcass.

He must have been so vain in life. But now, he lay, murdered and robbed and stripped of all dignity he had once possessed.

Man eats deer, rabbit, horse, chicken, pig, anything he can get his knife into. This bear should have been hibernating still through the winter, he must have been starving to have come out of his cave and hunt the food closest.

Why was it such a crime when that food happened to be man? She watched as Satan shamelessly reached inside the bears body as he harvested the rich kidneys, his whole arm swallowed.

Now with a man stinking of acids and blood, and a heavy load of a butchered bear, she walked with Satan away.

She though it peculiar how he walked beside her, his hand always resting on her side as they walked together back for the closets hunting post to trade. Why was he doing that? His slick glove a constant funny feel from where it was, steady and burrowed into her coat.

It was like an extension of friendship, a sub conscious gesture of companionship, it meant something…

She just happens to rather like the small patch of warmth he offers her, and the bracing over the uneven ground she offers him.


	25. Chapter 25

"Have you seen a foal recently, black socks, palomino-dun colour?"

"Little colt?" A mousy brown horse replies, looking up dead eyed out of the row of fellow hunting nags who were lined along the rail.

"Yes! Yes, that he is. Is he okay? Do you know where he is?" She question him in a gush, sparking with hope upon her first find since she has started asked around that morning.

"He went through here last night; some big hunting party with a load of stag came through with him tethered to the rear of some white pony. Headed for the Valley Forge, I presume." He drawled and yawned, not a least bit concerned because, well, life was not a thing to be concerned from such a placid animal's point of view.

"Thank you," she bided him before taking for an old mule off to the other side of the post.

"Excuse me mule, but have you seen a foal around recently with black socks and a creamy hide?"

He grunted as he chewed his mouthful of hay.

"Nope I haven't ma'am. We don't get a lot of foals out here in the working posts though, they are usually tucked back in the farmlands, so yours young one shouldn't be too hard to find." He nodded in a gesture that meant her luck; she flicked her ears towards him to show that he had her full attention and gratitude.

"Do you, by any chance, know where a large hunting party of a few days ago, the one that caught all the stag's, was headed for?"

"Ah, I remember that my brother Henry was taken on that hunt, and his rider works from in and out of the Black Creek hunting cabin."

"This brother Henry, what does he look like, so if I find him I'll know?"

"He's got some terrible spur scars on his sides, is pretty dark brown, got a big white blaze on his face that covers his eyes and a tail cut short by a foolish man back in the day."

She tisked in sympathy, as all horses do, when they learn of the tragedy of a lost tail. Never to be swirl in pre battle flair, never to stream behind you as you gallops, never to lazily shoo the flies and biters off your sides and the uncatchable spots on your rump.

"Well thank you very much, Mr Mule."

"If you do catch him, tell him that Trevor says hello."

"I will do that."

Satan whistles for her and she trots over, huffing and eyeing the saddle and bridle the man had just bargained off a patchwork clock man. Strapping and buckling them on her, she twists and flexes, testing the feel of them. It was new, because it had been so long, a whole season.

Cantering out from the town, headed wherever Satan dreams to go, she carries him and the new fashion with a new, strange feeling of pride.

She does not question when he veers her off the road and into the banks of snow, deeper into the forest. She goes, knowing that there is reason.

It is the last day of the year 1783. And where is she? Carrying Satan through the snow, far from anywhere, seeming to be bound for Black Creek.

This was the year of the first steamboat, the first hot air balloon, the first daily newspaper for the US, the first hydrogen balloon flight, the first American president…

Satan moves to stop himself from freezing to the saddle.

This was the year of the last man hanged at the Tyburn gallows, the last battle in the revolution, the last slave import to the northern states…

Midnight comes over them, and then goes.

That had been the year where the long died for peace finally came.


	26. Chapter 26

The close yowls of a bobcat cut through her thoughts. Why had Satan taken her off the track? Didn't he know how dangerous it was?

Of course he did, and on that thought, the most dangerous animal in these woods would be Satan anyway.

He was fiddling with the saddle bags, filling them with cartridges, snares, arrows and darts. How much did this man carry around in his belt?

Something had been bugging her for a while now, this change she felt in Satan. Before he had been, she does know how to explain it, cut off, above…just different.

Now he was back. Back to the devil she ran into war, back to the man who had threatened Washington and the Grandmaster Templar before storming off with her into the night.

She does not know how to truly make sense of how he will seem to shift from his true self to almost like he was a man on strings, or being controlled by an otherworld force. She does not know, but she senses it.

And it seems the different, calmer phases of Satan have finally left him alone to be the raw being that he is.

The spiked outline of a fort barrier came into view through the ancient, mossy trees of Black Creek. Satan dismounted and continued on his way there by foot, holding up a hand and hushing her to show that she was not to follow.

Ho ho, so that was what he was doing. Infiltration. Well she can work with that.

"Yeah, I'll be here then." She nicked after Satan, who had already disappeared into the ferns and shadows.

After about an hour she had grown bored with pawing frozen grass and roots up to eat. So she started down the little gully to the cold stream.

It had only started flowing recently, she could tell by the sharps of ice still gripping to its stepping stones and banks. A fat encased beaver waddled with a branch into the water like it was nothing more than a lovely thermal spring. After a while, she grew bored once more, even watching a handful of winter birds come down to the miniature, humble river (more like a stroke of bubbling blue across the white forest more than anything else) to bath and chatter did not hold her rapt attention for long.

So she walked in a circle again, sitting under a tree here, making snow hoof patterns there.

An explosion rippled throughout the quiet wilderness, a cloud of fire and smoke growing to loom over the fort where Satan was.

Then there was another hour of nothing.

She walked back up the gully, the saddle bags and tack clinching and bouncing as she pulled herself up the sharp incline.

Wondering off, deeper into the wonderland, she found a body. There was only a square of its brown hide showing from under the snow that had covered the animal. It was large too, massive even. She allowed herself to breathe again; it could not be any of her loved ones.

But as she daintily scraped the snow off the animal, she received a sharp slap of horror when the revealed face was familiar.

The bay stallion, eyes still wide open, dried blood covering nearly all of him.

She stood for a long while, staring into his frozen and unmoving eyes. Tracing his stiff, dead body and watching his sides _not_ move and fall.

Was Max just as bad?

Had he gotten home safely, alive, was he in a fit state to get there?

Was he still in the area, on the ground, collapsed, suffering, wounded, attack?

This was all her fault. The sooner she owned up to that the better.

"I'm sorry, this is my entire fault." She confessed to the glazed eyes of the dead.

No. It was the bay's fault too, she realised as she finally admitted to it out loud, if only he had not been such a disastrous horse. But she had known the nature of stallions and yet she had let herself trust him in the first few moments they had known each other. She had let the good deeds of Max become the good deeds of all stallions. She had forgotten the Max was a rare, rare find. He cared, not about himself but about other.

How had she let herself forget that?

The crunching of Satan coming back echoes throughout the forest.

She walks to his side, where he was waiting in the gully he left her at.

She hides her face in his shoulder, closes her eyes and listens to his steady heartbeat.

The blood on his clothes did not matter to her.

She really ought to do what a horse should normally do and just forget them all. They are the past, and it is in a horse nature to only look forward.

She ought to forget them.

But she can't, because against her best wishes they had- some bloody how- managed to become a family.

Winter is closing when she finally finds the horse of the hunting party. She has all but forgotten him name, but recognises him for his chopped tail and white face.

"The hunting party you were on back in the middle of winter," she starts walking straight over to him with purpose, no matter how bemused Satan was upon her back. "There was a little foal found with some elk," she began. His ears picked up at that in recognition.

"Ah yes, you too?" He asked her, making her confused.

"Me too what? Wait, no, just answer me this. What's happened to him?" She demanded it, and she was well within her rights to do so, she was the chief horse in this situation, in this entire frontier. The horses out here respected her, they all knew her by name and sight thanks to her days ghosting around by the Monmouth Tavern.

And this last half of winter, hunting the untouched sloped with Satan, coming into contact with the towns only to trade, had only elevated her reputation as chieftain. _Wild horse_ they whisper her as being,_ unbeatable, untameable; invincible._

"He was sold at the Lexington markets."

"To who?" She asked with a pitch to her voice- she practically screamed the question.

"Some frontier man, he had the insignia but no one could pick up what camp he was from."

"Okay, well, thank you very much." Disappointed but at least with one answer. "And before I forget, your brother the mule sends his well wishes."

He takes her words with a nod of the head, but before she manages to turn and leave, he cut her off.

"Listen, I think you should know. I get asked questions about Hearn daily, everyone knows him now and wants to learn more about the little guy. You got to understand chief, please don't hurt him, he's only tiny and doesn't understand what his doing is out of line, I-"

"What?" She swirl back to him, almost spluttering. Her? Hurt her own child?

"I mean...what- what part of that surprised you, exactly?" He had crumbled back meekly from her. It was a sight, a muscular hunting horse trying to collapse in on himself as a rather malnourished (due to the lack of food she comes by on the week long hunts with Satan) mare glares at him.

"All of it." She told him frankly, raising her head and starring how her snout at him in a 'explain _now_' gesture.

"Well, he's made a name for saving horse's skins. He stepped in when a horse was getting whipped, got a copping but it stopped the other from being all but killed. He's got a way with the forest animals that none of us understand, he be opening gates in the middle of night and, well chief, some are whispering that when he becomes old enough, by summer really, that he should become chief...you know... instead of you."

"Well..." she wanted to say something, but only ended repeating herself dumbly.

"...well..I.."

Satan kicked her, impatient, and so she left the white faced brown, confused yet proud yet terrified yet...well...well?..._well_.


	27. Chapter 27

_Okay guys, we're on the downhill slope from here. You're reviews have been fantastic support and have kept me going, so let's smash the rest of this out. Should be complete by this time next week._

* * *

She watches from the shadows, always watching. Follows him through the streets and through the forest. She never lets him leave her line of sight, for at any moment, he could send a small whistle into the air. And that would be her cue to leap to his side.

She is so close, so _frustratingly_ close. Watching Satan pick the lock on the chest calmly with two dead guards at his feet, their bodies already looted clean of coins or valuables.

Never to waste.

And the butterflies are flirting about in the air, and the barn, _the _barnis just up there. On the hilltop, she can see the fence line and the tavern and the fort and the elk infested forest but there is _no bleed'n sign_ _of Max_.

Leaving Satan, her partner for many months now, she trots up through the lush green grass of the warmest days of spring. She comes up to the fence, the sheep mingle and it looks like she has never spent a day away.

Pressing up against the fence line, the leather of her saddles arm's that criss-cross her chest brush against the old splintering wood.

She glances back and sees that Satan has moved on from the chest. He has been distracted by a nest of feathers just spied over on the island that sits in the shallows of the Monmouth beach.

Then she sees movement, inside the barn, rustling about in the hay.

"Max," she shouts out, and is delighted when a grey head jerks up in surprise.

"Out here," she continues, watching as his head scans around before catching sight of her walking down the fence line towards him.

Rolling over onto his feet and up, he walks out and meets her halfway.

"Where did you go? I was so worried about what had happened to you and then the elk told me about what's happened with Hearn."

She nods, understanding.

"I went to try and find him," she tells him matter-of-factly. "He is alive and owned by some frontier man and doing fine, but that is all I have managed to learn."

"_All_ you have managed to learn?" He questions cheekily, giving her a sideways glance.

"You've heard too?" She asks, wondering.

"Of course, the grumblings have been a lot strong down this part of the frontier because everyone here knew him when he was growing up. Everyone has questions for the horses coming through. It really is insane, but he has pretty much dropped off the map. Or at least the frontier anyway." He grumbled, and instantly she knew that he feared the same that she does.

"He could be _anywhere_." She whispered, mystified and mortified all at the same damn time. She looks out over the ocean and feels the wind rip into her mane.

Satan was making his way up the slope, having spotted her from the shore.

"I found the bay stallion's body."

Max twitched but remained silent next to her.

"All the way to Black Creek, hey? Did you honestly come out of that fight any better than he looked?"

She eyed the new scars on Max that she had not remembered being there before.

"Well, I can say that I nearly made my old man keel over from a heart attack when I got home, and I will leave it at that." The last part was said with a growl. She was not used to being warned or threatened; after all, she was the chief.

"This may be the last time we meet, Max, so I would like to say that you have been a perfect stallion to me, but a better friend."

She knew that being a friend was something that Max treasured more than being a stallion, so she did not need to turn to know that he was glowing.

"Well thanks, chief."

With Satan's wet and sandy legs around her ribs, she shares a smile with Max and knows that closure has been found.

And with that she trots away down the path, into the deeper parts of the wilderness once more.


	28. Chapter 28

She's got a theory, you see. That what they are actually doing out here all this time is not hunting exactly, but searching for where Satan's tribe ran off to.

And it's a pretty damn good theory. With him riding her into the backstreets of the frontier and wester than the rustlers dared to explore. He's got this sizzling determination to find them. His lot. His family. They got to be out here somewhere, and no matter how many valleys they track down into or rivers they cross, every night he looks into their camp fire with the same stern face.

She had no doubt that one day he will find them, but today, nor the next day, is that particular day.

And so when the hunting bag gets so full her knees are bending the wrong way with every step, he will turn back for the towns to trade, manage his homestead, collect his assassin's reports, and prepare for another month searching in the pure, true wild.

She sometimes wonders how one man can be lord of a port, grand master assassin of the colonies yet still be hardly there at all. She thinks they are starting to wonder the same thing, all his friends and workers, but they must understand just like her, that he is searching for his runaway family and shalt be giving up until he does or dies.

One summer day, in Concord, she spotted Sage chatting to a man by the door of a brown brick house. She could not stop, but kept on jogging the Satan down to the trading post, where he took the hunting bags of her sweat soaked side and took them inside to trade.

Satan does not tie her up, he never did and he never will. She has stood by him for months now and never swayed in her loyalty. Besides, it was better for her, for if he drew trouble she could run to safety. This was especially true in the wild, where there are predators perfectly capable of killing a horse unable to run away.

Leaving Satan, knowing that it takes a while for the man and the tradesmen to go through the items and decided on the value, she weaved her way through the district back to the brick house.

They had gone, but Sage's trail was still thick in the humid summer air. With mosquitos whining about her ears and legs, she traced the woman's steps down the road and around the backside of farm, back into town, through a clump of bushes and to a big red tavern in the middle of the frontier settlement.

She lolled up to it casual, blending into the other horses tethered up to the hay bins around it as much as she could.

She appreciated Satan weaving the pretty feathers into her mane and saddle, she really did, but it made it hard to be sneaky when surrounded by horses in the standard saddles of the colonies.

There were quite a few horses coming and going, trotting about the town on this rather busy Saturday. A parade of troops came drumming around the square, their presence keeping the peace about the town.

She was filled with a sudden rush of contentment when she realised that the soldiers no longer made the people fear and worry, but feel protected and safe instead. Casting a quick glance through the window of the tavern, she saw Sage sitting by a table with another woman, bottles cast about them as they sat huddled in conversation.

She would wait for the friend to come out, for indeed the woman was a very close friend. She was the only one there for here when she was being controlled by the musterers, the one that sat with her throughout the exhaustion of all her races, the one that rested by her neck and stroked her while she gave birth. This woman was indeed someone who had managed to snuggle her way into her heart.

She got distracted by watching the markets across the road, the legs of many types of animals hanging on hooks, being swarmed by the masses of summer flies and people scooped baskets of fruits and vegetables into their shopping bags, affordable and plentiful in their quality.

As leaves drifted about everywhere in the currents of air, she watches wondering children giggle as they run barefoot about.

Summer is a brilliant time of the year. She thinks with sorrow that it had been two whole seasons since she had last seen or heard any new word on her son.

He would be up to her shoulder now, he would be starting to be trained on the lead; maybe they've broken him in early? She does not know because she does _not know_.

It _infuriates_ her; almost as it infuriates Satan not knowing where his tribe has hidden themselves away at.

Sage has come out and is walking past. She almost blinks and missing the woman, but gets her with a quick movement. She nudges the woman playfully from behind with her head.

The native swirls around in surprise, her long loose hair feathering over her face as she comes to a halt and takes in the animal before her.

So ragged and terrible, terribly poor she has grown. Circling around, the woman's careful and capable hands inspect her like they used to do. Stripping tack off after a race, caring for her when everyone else was too busy posing in the winner's circle.

She feels the elegant yet worn fingers of the woman worm under her bridle and saddle, pulling them off and creating a feeling of nostalgia. Her hands ghost over her sides where new scares can be seen from the fight way back with the bay stallion and the wounds she has gotten from being ridden hard by Satan throughout the uncharted mountains in the untamed west.

And the woman is sighing and groaning and spitting all at the same time. That the lovely her, her lovely horse that always seemed to shine with so much spirit and health even when nearly dead in the dirt, how now she just looks run off her feet.

Imagine! Her, the record breaker of the frontier, a champion of the cross country races, always chopping at her bit to run, now tired and worn. What could have possibly, possibly happen?

That's the moment that Satan comes up behind her and basically tells her in a threatening way that 'that's my horse, get your thieving hands off'.

And Sage turns around sharply and, oh! The fury there, the way her fingers are _twitching _and her nails _itching_ to dig into whoever has done _such a thing_ to a horse that has always been beautiful and gentle to her.

She prays that Satan gets mercy, because the poor guy is so misunderstood in this moment, and even if he explains it will sound poor.

He is just a raw being, of a 'get it done and man the fuck up' variety. Quiet, serious, but never in the wholly hell to be mistaken for obedient or placid. She is not his horse, she is his partner.

Partner in crime, yeah. That's what they are. And that's what Satan understands but no one else does. She is scarred, he is scarred, and they take the falls from the ravines and encounters with the bears together.

She watches Satan's face carefully as he listens and shields himself from Sages insult and occasional punches. They are flimsy, she is puny (but that's how she came to know you, because she was light enough to qualify as you're jokey.)

Satan has a strange mixture of anger, frustration and hope playing across his features.

And Sage is still spitting fire at the man, no breathes or gaps. She wonders how Satan will fight his way out of this one.

What he does is ask her a question.

In the Mohawk tongue.

She freezes like a statue before replying with a suspicious glare.

Their conversation lasts for about a week, just talking and talking and talking and sharing what went wrong and what they had known and comparing stories and experiences and does it _go on._

For the first time in a long time she gets to just laze. No distant horizon to check, no prize deer to run down. She can just sleep and graze on the tamed grass in the paddocks of the Concord where Satan had turned her out to after Sage had drilling into him that '_she needs rest, idiot!'_

In the morning Sage will come down and brushes the year old knots and tangles for her. She loves the feel, the careful, pleasant company of Sage. It puts her to sleep as she relaxes, eyes closes and head dropped, the woman humming a familiar tune that she used to make in the long, lonely hours at the corrals.

When Satan comes down to spend time with her, it is different, he is there to sit under a tree and read on her side from where she has rolled down next to him. He is there to flick through reports and mumble his thoughts out loud to her, processing the assassin's recent troubles with a new Templar fraction sailing across the ocean.

And she will curiously listen in, well education on the goings on, many damaging secrets hers to know.

And they will eventually fall asleep in the butterfly invested grass under the fruit laden trees, in the cool shade, hiding out together from the harsh glare of summer.


	29. Chapter 29

She is dozing in the sables at the manor when the pony shakes her away.

"Chief, chief," she says, swishing her black tail with anticipation. She belongs to one of lumbers for his children to learn to ride on and use in their mischievous adventures.

She snorts and snuffles and generally moans and groans as she blinks her eyes warily and gets to her feet.

"What is it Joan?" She asks the excitable pint sized mare.

"You never gonna believe what I overheard from a horse coming through from the frontier." She is wiggling like a dog with a treat above its head, barely containable in her glee.

"What is?" She asks again, this time starting to become saturated in the glow of Joan and excited as well, even though she had no idea what this was all for.

"Oh! I it would be better if you heard it from the horse himself, he's down at the tavern, but hurry he might be ridden out soon!"

And with that she threw her silky little body down the path and back into town, a powerful and massive horse keeping tight to the small things working heels. She followed the pony's sleek black form through the piles of autumn leaves that lay across the road.

Down the paths, around the walking travellers, over the bridge at the river and into the sables that sat to the side of the Davenport tavern.

"Tell her, tell her, tell her!" Joan screams as she prances and giggles over to the side of a chestnut gelding. He looks over to her, no look of joy but fear as his face with a handsome white star as he comes to find her.

"Come on then," she encourages the gelding, smiling as her friend continued to giggle at the nervous steed's side.

"Well, just yesterday one of the carnival races had just finished up." He started apprehensively, avoiding eye contact. "And me and my rider were at the finishing line, waiting for the winner, you see…" He scuffed his front hoof against the ground, focusing more on it that anything else.

"And this was one that you had ridden in before, you know, one of you last ones. And so the normal time was seven but you had done it in five, and we were waiting you see, and everyone was expecting the seven hours but there was this horse, right."

"Just tell her, she won't be angry!" said Joan, impatient and prancing around as the gelding failed to get to the good part quick enough.

"A horse beat your time, ma'am. He's finished the race in four and he's not even fully grown!" He had raised his voice by the end of it, like he was expecting her to start denying or threatening him for telling her. Instead she just breathed deeply and asked him quietly,

"Not fully grown how?"

"He'll be a yearly at the start of this winter, chief," he looked guilty at her. "I'm sure you've figure out how he is by now, right?" He mumbled quietly, almost looking like he had betrayed someone.

"Well, who is he then," she prompted the timid horse, but in her heart feeling like she knew the answer already.

And it was making her body fill with frost and fire at the very same time.

"That little foal from winter that had everyone saying that he should become the chief, not you."

It's at that point that Joan squealed so loud it had her ears ringing.

"It's Hearn, Hearn, Hearn, Hearn!" She cantered around and around the stable yard before skidding to a stop nose to nose with Lucky Girl, the great clay coloured Percheron looking down into the bright eyes of the small Chincoteague pony.

"You've just _got_ to go see him, you've _got _to!"

She was still too stunned by the information to really refuse her.

* * *

_Funfact (because I love sneaking them in but this one I really wanted to point out) Joan is a Chincoteague pony, which is known to be kind, athletic and a highly intelligent companion with plenty of stamina and versatility. And, more importantly, George Washington is reported to have owned one which he rode over one hundred and fifty miles in a single day._


	30. Chapter 30

"Okay, this is how the whole operation is gonna do down." Joan whispered to her from where they were hiding behind some bushes. "I've stolen this poster here, you're gonna take it now, and walk up to her and drop it at her feet. Okay?" She regarded Joan with an unconvinced eye.

"I don't think it's going to-"

"Of _course_ it's going to work! I am a pony of incomparable smarts so this _has_ to work."

She sighed and resigned to her fate. Taking the poster up in her mouth, she spared one last glance at the gleeful black before trotting over to where Sage had been setting up a snare. The human mumbled a surprised sound when she saw her.

Dropping the poster like Joan has told her too, she waited with ears keen as the woman picked it up and inspected it curiously.

She mumbled something, and she remember that this was the time that Joan has said to nicker and nudge the at the human's shoulder.

Sage regarded her with raised eyebrows, leaning on her hands from where she had nudged her just a little too zealously. Reading the poster for the cross country race again, she sighed.

"I can't believe I'm doing this, so you want to race again, do you girl?"

She heard Joan squeal in achievement, while she on the other hand just marvelled at the little pony's intelligence. She would have never been able to recognise that the poster was for the races, let along think to persuade Sage to ride with her again in the way she had.

"You really are something," she told the silky black pony later on the next day as Sage prepared her to go.

"No autographs please," Joan replied with a wicked smile before trotting off down the road with no less than four little daughters giggling on her back.

It was the last race of the season, Hearn had been winning titles and trophies left right and centre, snatching and running away with the crown of the best horse of the season.

It was the last race before winter closed the carnival down, the final hurrah that had everyone turning out. She had not raced in this one; she had escaped just days before she was due to run in it.

And now here she was, desperately looking throughout the line-up and swirling, squeezing crowd, looking for a glimpse of a son that must be nearly fully grown by down.

When she found him, her heart all but stopped.

He was sleek and handsome and a mother could not gush enough about the fine boy she had born, raised and then had stolen.

She marched over, shouldering horses out of her way and giving them quick bites when they were too adrenaline pumped over the race to get out of her _fucking_ way.

The horse beside him got one look of her glare as she stalked their way and quickly left for her to take the place on the starting line.

And all of a sudden, she was filled with nerves. This was foolish, stupid, why had this every seemed like a good idea? She watched Hearn eyes roam the course again, focused and still while all the other horses jumped and pranced and foamed about him.

"Hello," she said timidly, wondering if maybe it wasn't him, maybe she was wrong. Their gazes locked for a split second, making her heart die then be electrocuted back to life by her own shock waves as those eyes, those eyes swept over her with no recognition at all.

"Hello," he said back before brushing her off and focusing back on the wide track that lay before them. His voice had grown deep, but was still gentle like it had always been as a child, still familiar to her.

It was undoubtable her son, not matter how little he recognised her. Why with his black socks (as black as a city man's polished boots) and his creamy coat (like vanilla cake batter) and his mane with black roots but white ends. He had grown light dapples, an echo of his father, which were so light they were only visible on his belly and the tender side of his neck.

She was glad Hearn was so fixed on the track up ahead, eyes focused and unmoving, because it gave her time to just _look_ at him. Her son. Her son, not even fully grown yet bigger than most other horses that had started to gather on the line up.

Still not a big as her…yet.

"Hearn," she said again, trying to get his attention before the man shot the gun. He was climbing up the stairs now, ready to start it. Everyone was growing silent, soon, so soon they would be racing.

She would be racing alongside her son.

The little foal she had forced from Boston to Monmouth. Her child, her foal, her little foal that used to trail behind her, long legged and tiny-tiny and full of love for her. Bursting with love for his mother.

At the sound of his name, Hearn's head snapped around to her.

"How do you know my name?" He asked her, she ignored his question, knowing that there was no time to explain. The man had reached his flat form, the crowds were quiet and Sage was tensed on her back ready for her horse to explode underneath her.

"Have you raced against you're father yet?" His eyes winded further.

"How did you know that I was his son?" He asked her, again she ignored him.

"Well don't think this wins going to be as easy as that one was, I _did_ tell you that I _was_ better at racing than your father."

That's when the eyes widened in an resonance of a memory.

Bam!

And suddenly they were lost in the charging sea of horse, but soon, they would stretch out and by all the means of the world, it happened at it was just her and him, racing side to side, jockeying for first place.

He was nosing ahead of her, gathering speed from seemingly nowhere. So she stretched her stride longer and practically devoured the ground, nudging past Hearn like he had stopped.

They came down the slope and sailed over the hay jump the humans had resurrected. The humans waiting on the sidelines screaming at the sight.

The crowds had doubled when word got out that the record breaker of the frontier had entered the race at the last moment. Everyone was brimming at the expected showdown.

And what a show down they were getting, sometimes, she would be in the lead, something Hearn would be, both of them pushing one another harder than they thought they could possibly ride.

And she was sweating, sweating and foaming and Sage was fidgeting like she only did when she knew that the race was going to end badly- won- but badly.

Charging across the rivers and plains and under the forest canopies, sailing over jumps and hurdles and meter wide trenches.

She hardly recognised the finish line when it came into view, her eyes were foggy and shaking, her legs numb and stumbling.

Hearn was no better, but he was ahead, he was winning, he was going to win.

She could not let him, she was undefeatable. While this was a human race, every horse was watching it keenly too, because the title of chief hung in the balance.

She needed to win, so she forced on, feeling like she was charging into brick wall after brick wall with a cart piled high with stone hitched to her back.

She gain, she gained and gained and gain until they were neck and neck, stride to stride.

Mirror images, both viciously battling for more speed.

Speed none of them had. They were winded, wounded, sprained and spent and exhausted.

And then, she realised. One day, her records will be broken, it was a fact of life. So why not here? Why not after such an awe inspiring long and dangerous and breakneck fast ride,, to be racing for the line neck and neck and to miss out by a foot to her own blood and creation?

It sounded like a fairy tale ending. But the thing was, she was not going to let him. Young, still a child, growing in arrogance.

So, she did not let him. With every step she gained a hair length over him.

A hair length, over a hair length, over a hair length.

And she felt him failing about for more but finding nothing as she slowly rocked into a tiny little lead.

As soon as she crossed the line, she started to collapsed; Sage felt her giving way and lept from her back to safety. She rolled and crashed and made a shower of dirt and rocks as she finally came to a halt. Looking up into the eyes of Hearn as he went to walk over to her but found himself falling down into collapse as well, she looked him dead in the eye and wheezed.

"Sucker."

"Never knew you had it in you, Mother." He said from where he was heaving and laying on his knees.

"Ah, good, you remembered."

Then, and only then, did she allowed herself to pass out.


	31. Chapter 31

When she awoke, it was in the warmth of a stable, closed, fluffed in tones of sawdust and smelling of oats and molasses. It made her mouth water.

And there was Satan, leaning on the wall, arms crossed and face veiled in shadows.

How long had he been waiting there? How did he know that she was here? The most she understood was that Sage had smuggled her out from Satan's manor barn… so maybe he was upset about that?

She coughed up dry air, making her throat burn with what felt like hot shards. Everything ached, everything was screaming at her to collapse back down into the soft bedding and just _sleep._

But, no, she was a wicked horse to her poor body.

Struggling up, she limped over to Satan and put her running nose to his stiff shoulder. She felt the muscle and the steel and the damn tension buzzing around underneath the stiff armoured fabric of the hooded cloak.

He cleared his throat and muttered and in general reasoned with himself that even though she was okay now, his anger towards Sage was still righteous.

Ah, so that was what his mood was about. She chuckled but stopped quickly because it made her ribs hurt. Humans, they are over complicate things sometimes and end up hurting themselves in the process.

She swished her tail and just generally enjoyed the motherly warmth and comforting scents that hung throughout the lovely stable block.

Eventually, Satan left. When he opens the door she catches snippets of the busy working stable outside her heavy wooden walled box. The pawing of steel shoes against the stone ground, the hurries of grooms and ranting, panting voices of horses that share the corridor. It must be a rather full and lively place, out there, on the other side. But in here is quiet, and that is exactly what she needs right now.

The doctor visits over the week of confinement and is amazed at the progress. She is not, Sage is not either. The woman just stands beside the hectic vet, hands on her luscious hips and nodding along.

She knows Sage is carrying great ugly bruises under her skin from the fall she took with her. She can smells the rotting blood that has been broken and bleed under the skin. She will offer an apologetic look, but she is confident in the knowledge that Sage can look after herself perfectly well.

But that fact seems to be something that Satan struggles with understanding.

Her first day out, the vet had bandaged her legs for support or something. She struggled to understand why the cosy cloth can possible help her, but lets him wrap her four legs up with a curious and inquisitive expression. Sage leads her out into the cobbled and wooden warm of the sables. The roof is filled with birds' nests and cobwebs and stables line on all side, great healthy heads poking out from above the half doors.

This is indeed a stable of a rich man, if not all the grooms rushing about with bales of sawdust and hay, if not for the vet that walks besides her, watching how her knees rise and back sways with keen observance.

The big barn doors come up, they are being peeled open and the wondrous outside is just on the other side. How she longs to run through the grass and have a good roll in the mud again.

The doors widen, and the outside reveals its white and windy and cold self to her. Winter came while she was away, locked inside healing.

Boldly following Sage into the snowy court yard with no hesitation, the sudden chill makes her feel a new sort of annoying pain.

Sage walks her down the path and down around some trees, about the lanes that stretched around the numerous paddocks. This is indeed a very rich man' estate who has a lot of passion for his horses.

She watches them, dressed in their cloaks and leg warmers, grazing on piles of hay that are spotted throughout the paddocks, galloping around and tossing their tail in their lovely little pampered lives.

She thinks that she would have loved being a racer if it meant this was her home.

They are coming back up a particularly muddy lane way from all the hooves that have been stamping up and down it, when a horse calls out to her. She does not recognise them at first, with their heavy weather coat buckled to them and turned hoary white from where they had been rolling in the snow.

But he comes closer to the fence line, ears pricked as he crosses the ground in a magnificent style of stride that would have any man who knew his horses labelling him a sure fire trophy stealer.

"Hearn," she greets her son as he comes to a stop, great clouds of breath billowing out.

"You've gotten too old for racing old mare," he tells her gazing worriedly yet with a mischievous gleam to her bandaged legs. "I was up and jumping in two days, you hadn't even woken up by then." A cluster of distant horses were trotting over, their mulching legs spraying snow behind them as they came over to see what their paddock mate was doing.

"Hey! I had come out of retirement, so give a woman a break. And I still beat your ass anyway."

And this was the part where she knew her son had grown. When he just smiles wide and dips his head in a proud admittance of defeat.

"I think that will always be one of the best races of my career, mother." His friends came up behind him, skidding to stops that made snow fly and churning around one another as some fired up ones refused to stop running so quickly.

"Who's this Hearn?"

"What're doing Hearn?"

They pressed in tight around him, all fighting for a good view of the horse across the fence.

"This is my mother," he said matter of factly. There was a quiet as every horse looked from him to her, before the mutterings and nodding started.

"Yeah I can believe that,"

"He's kind of like her, just shaded different."

She watched them all discuss it with one another, some of the most tactful ones starting to peel away when they realised that they had interrupted a private discussion.

"Have you met your elk friend yet, I know he had promised to find you to me."

Hearn ears flicked forward in intense curiously,

"Really? I had always thought of going back but after so long I've started to wonder what the reception would be like, sometimes I feel like I was to blame for the murders, you know, mother?"

She nodded her head, he had been terribly young when it happened and you tended to traumatise and twist events in your head after time.

"I know that the elk only blame the humans,"

"But horses were carrying them, my kind rode the hunters down the slope and ran the bulls down for them, I felt so guilty and ashamed at the time, I just…"

She understands, she can imagine, her tiny, tiny foal never having seen wrong or death before, to be confronted with a battle of slaughter that seemed to him like horses versus elk. He must have been torn; he must have felt like he needed to take a side, like he couldn't be sitting on a fence in the middle of a war zone anymore.

"No one is to blame, the men were hunting to feed their families, the horses were working for their humans and the elk knew the dangers. Blame only leads to destruction; I've seen it happen too often.

Later on, they would turn her out to pasture with Hearn and they would have numerous conversations in soft pine needle bed under a cluster of pines. He had many questions, she had many too.

One of his softest questions, one of his last, was that when he was younger he had heard talk of her, the chief, and had always looked up to the legends that the horses told about her. He wanted to hear them from her, the ones that were true.

And so, she started from the beginning. The legend of how she freed hundreds from the cruellest rustlers in the west, how she raced to victory after victory, especially that race that he side during the storm that created a flash flood and had only a third of the horses live to reach the last checkpoint.

And about how far west she has truly ridden and how many wolves' packs she has truly run with, and is it seriously true that she was a mustang?

She didn't know half of this was out there, that the horses said this much about her when she was not around. It was humbling, to learn that she was the hero of many foal tells about bravery and fighting the bad guy.

But the one she wanted to tell him must about, was one that did not exist.

Of how, amongst the bomb blasts and dying screams, she came to know Satan.


	32. Chapter 32

_I thank each and every one who reviewed. I love to hear your opinions, so please don't feel you can't post a few words of your thoughts because it is completed, because I will still be keeping a motherly eye on this fic of mine that grew WAY out of hand._

_You know, I was actually in the process of deleting it because I thought it was stupid when it was just hours old, but then that little first review popped up. Just a few short words that boiled down to 'Nice. Keep going.' I remember hitting my pillow and going "noooooo! Now I've got to actually do something because I secretly fear letting others down," Thanks a lot to that person. You know who you are._

_Anyway. Enjoy._

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They watched from the rise as the battle raged. Satan was deathly upon her back and she too was filled with equal rage for the sight before her. It shadowed sights they had seen before, a long time ago, but still drilled into their minds. Burned and seared to the day they die.

Satan's tomahawk and blades sheathed and pressed into her side. He had hung them up years ago, he had cast the hidden blades on to the next master seasons upon seasons ago.

But this time, for one last time, he had taken back his familiar arms. And along with the tomahawk and blades and a now old, worn hooded coat, he had fetched her from the pasture.

He could have ridden any horse into the fray, into battle, he could have chosen his current young and fiery appaloosa over her, the old grandmother horse in the pasture, sleeping away her aches and pains and doing nothing more with the last of her days but eating and sleeping and retelling stories of another time to the foals that listen wide eyed.

He should have let her rest in retirement, undisturbed down the back edges of the manor paddocks.

But he had come for her, just like he came for the tomahawk and blades and cloak.

And with no signal at all, she charged down into the midst of the hectic war that rage and seethed in the blood dripped plain.

She was old; she hadn't trotted in the last year. Yet here she was, streaming into battle.

Not an ounce of fear or regret. Just faith, pure faith and willing to carry the grey haired Satan into the heart so he can finish this. This little shard that can grow into something more, something that will enslave her children and grandchildren to become meat shields in front of the firing line, to be broken harsh and cruel so as to get them on the battle front and keep up with the piling demand.

She does not want that life for them, she will willingly lie down if only to protect them from war and the desperation that it awakes in humans that once used to be kind and patient to her kind.

She wishes that they never have to feel the type of terror she once did, prays they never feel like those that had once stood to the front of her and at the sides as they were whipped and spurred to run through the mines and shrapnel. She hopes they never have to discover the state many horses go into as they run, so fear filled that they are numb and docile and perfectly willing to run because there is something to run from, they just don't know what it is anymore. Who is the bad guy?

Everyone is the bad guy in war.

And for a horse that has never known binds and chains, those ropes are mindboggling, how something so slim and tiny and weak can possible contain you, large and vast and massive. How your rippling muscles bulge as you try to free yourself, yet get out to freedom or fight you cannot.

And the horror.

Mindboggling. Incomprehensible.

Racing in, so fast and strong that no bullets could aim her up right and always missed. Tail streaming out like their own third party crusade as they come in.

She knows that she is racing the physical form of slaughter into their midst. And she is alright with that.

It's alright. She's alright with that. Bowling through the fighting soldiers and the sea, the lashing waves of the cavalry and muskets.

She is filled with holes, blood is streaming out everywhere, she's coated all over in an unalloyed sickly sluggly red.

But still she will march Satan to the heart. Right up, right up and all the way, without a second thought or stumble. All the way, she is being filled upon filled with lead. More and more, redder and redder.

But even when he has lunged from her side and raced away, hacking and twirling and making them fall one by one, working his way to the two captains that battled in the centre, still even then she keeps at his side.

She takes them all for him, standing between the firing lines and Satan, growling into their little cold dark faces.

And eventually, eventual old man Satan goes on, eventually a cannon gets her in the side and bowls her over, eventually she lays deep in the long grass, as red as it and camouflaged so well you could not pick her out.

And eventually, she watches the night sky,

And eventually, she dies.

She was small in death, crippled, beaten, still; while moments before she had been the largest, proudest, savagest sight on earth.

But still, she lay.

Forgotten.

- Connor, On The Subject Of A Certain Horse-

I named her Lucky Girl because she seemed to have an incomprehensible amount of luck following her around. But after meeting her a few times, in all those different places, charging to my side in Boston, blurring past me down the trail in Black Creek, through the flames at the battle of Chesapeake, through the grotty frosted glass of a tavern window, on the Boston harbour in front of the firing squad, at the hunting camp with bodies and tents just recently torn apart and destroyed and dripping blood everywhere around her...

The more I saw her, the more I came to understand. This was no luck, there was nothing of fate or tricks or coincidence. She is all to herself, all muscle and brain and pure, pure ability to alienate everyone that comes across her and to never, never fall. Surrender had never been thought of. Defeat was not a concept.

She was a concurrer.

And she concurred all.

A warrior from hell, armoured in the rage of the fire pits, she was. She was the devil's dog- no-

She was Satan himself.


End file.
